Comparison of reliability and the availability between four systems with warm standby components and standby switching failures

Abstract: Four different system configurations with warm standby components and standby switching failures are compared based on their reliability and availability. The time-to-repair and the time-to-failure for each of the primary and warm standby components are assumed to follow the negative exponential distribution. We develop the explicit expressions for the mean time-to-failure, MTTF, and the steady-state availability, A T (∞), for four configurations. For all four configurations, comparisons are made for specific values of distribution parameters and of the cost of the components. The configurations are ranked based on MTTF, A T (∞), and cost/benefit where benefit is either MTTF or A T (∞). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]