Availability and cost-benefit evaluation for a repairable retrial system with warm standbys and priority

Abstract

This paper investigates a warm standby repairable retrial system with two types of components and a single repairman, where type 1 components have priority over type 2 in use. Failure and repair times for each type of component are assumed to be exponential distributions. The retrial feature is considered and the retrial time of each failed component is exponentially distributed. By using Markov process theory and matrix-analytic method, the system steady-state probabilities are derived, and the system steady-state availability and some steady-state performance indices are obtained. Using the Bayesian approach, the system parameters can be estimated. The cost-benefit ratio function of the system is constructed based on the failed components and repairman's states. Numerical experiments are given to evaluate the effect of each parameter on the system steady-state availability and optimize the system cost-benefit ratio with repair rate as a decision variable.