Availability analysis of a general time distribution system with the consideration of maintenance and spares

摘要

A one component system with the mean time to failure following general time distributions is used as the subject and which is also affected by corrective maintenance (CM), preventive maintenance (PM), stock level, degrading and failed components repair turnaround. The opportunity of operating CM and PM is governed by the state of the system and also the stocks on hand. By defining the system's state space and the sojourn time of each state, the state equation is derived with the supplementary variable method. Since in the state equation all the time distributions involved are not exponential, the regular method is difficult to resolve. A new method is proposed to cope with this problem. Two important parameters are introduced into the equation and the method proposed in the proposition is perfectly general. By this method the original problem can be transformed in a form as a regular Markov problem. Then the solving process is given and a vector Cauchy sequence of iteration variables is constructed to obtain the final solution. In each calculation the solution of the system's steady-state is derived by the minimum norm theory. Finally, a number of numerical examples are illustrated and some interesting results are derived.