210
Views
19
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Section A

Availability of a repairable retrial system with warm standby components

, , &
Pages 2279-2297 | Received 13 Jul 2010, Accepted 05 Mar 2013, Published online: 14 May 2013
 

Abstract

In this paper, we study a repairable K-out-of-(M+W) retrial system with M identical primary components, W standby components and one repair facility. The time-to-failure and time-to-repair of the primary and standby components are assumed to be exponential and general distributions, respectively. The failed components are immediately for repair if the server is idle, otherwise the failed machines would enter an orbit. It is assumed that the retrial times are exponentially distributed. We present a recursive method using the supplementary variable technique and treating the supplementary variable as the remaining repair time to obtain the steady-state probabilities of down components at arbitrary epoch. Then, a unified and efficient algorithm is developed to compute the steady-state availability. The method is illustrated analytically for the exponential repair time distribution. Sensitivity analysis of the steady-state availability with respect to system parameters for a variety of repair time distributions is also investigated.

2000 AMS Subject Classifications:

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions which led to improvements in this paper.

Reprints and Corporate Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

To request a reprint or corporate permissions for this article, please click on the relevant link below:

Academic Permissions

Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content?

Obtain permissions instantly via Rightslink by clicking on the button below:

If you are unable to obtain permissions via Rightslink, please complete and submit this Permissions form. For more information, please visit our Permissions help page.