Reliability performance for dynamic systems with cycles of K regimes

ABSTRACT The environment in which a system operates can have a crucial impact on its performance; for example, a machine operating in mild or harsh environments or the flow of a river changing between seasons. In this article, we consider a dynamic reliability system operating under a cycle of K regimes, which is modeled as a continuous-time Markov process with K different transition rate matrices being used to describe the various regimes. Results for the availability of such a system and probability distributions of the first uptime are given. Three special cases, which occur due to situations where the durations of the regime are constant and where the number of up states in different regimes are identical or increasing, are considered in detail. Finally, some numerical examples are shown to validate the proposed approach.