Reliability analysis of imperfect coverage systems with a shared warm standby

Abstract

Redundancy technique is commonly applied to satisfy the reliability requirements of fault-tolerant systems. Warm standby, a compromise between hot standby and cold standby in term of power consumption and recovery time, has attracted wide attention over the past several decades. However, the existing reliability analysis methods for warm standby system with imperfect coverage are difficult to deal with some cases, such as non-exponential time-to-failure distributions for the system components and the systems with shared standbys. In this paper, a new approach based on step function and impulse function is proposed to overcome the limitations of the existing approaches. The reliability of a system including shared standbys is deduced considering two kinds of imperfect fault coverage models, which contain Element Level Coverage (ELC) and Fault Level Coverage (FLC). The proposed approach can applicable to any type of time-to-failure distributions for the system components subject to imperfect fault coverage. A case study is presented to illustrate the applications and advantages.