Overall availability and risk analysis of a general robot–safety device system.

We analyse the availability of a general robot–safety device system characterised by the feature of cold standby and by an admissible risky state. In contrast to the previous literature, we allow a general failure-free time distribution for the robot and, as an example, we present computational results for Coxian failure and repair time distributions. In order to decide whether the risky state is admissible, we introduce a risk criterion based on the notion of rare events. The criterion is always satisfied in the case of fast repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]