Characteristic Reliability Measures of Mixed Standby Components and Asymptotic Estimation

In this paper, we investigate the reliability measures: availability () T A ∞ and mean time to system failure MTTF , for four configurations of series systems with mixed standby components: cold and warm. The time to repair and to failure for each of the operative and warm standby components are assumed to follow the exponential distribution. Com- parisons of the computed MTTF 's and steady state availabilities () T A ∞ for the four configurations are obtained for specific values of distribution parameters and cost of the components. The configurations are then ranked based on MTTF , () T A ∞ and cost/ benefit, where benefit is either MTTF or () T A ∞ . Asymptotic estimation of MTTF , () T A ∞ and cost/ benefit are computed for the optimal systems.