Reliability evaluation of generalized phased-mission systems with repairable components

Existing methodologies for generalized phased-mission system (GPMS) are applicable mainly to non-reparable systems. This paper proposes an analytical approach to evaluate the reliability of phased-mission systems (PMS) considering both combinatorial phase requirements (CPR) and repairable components. The CPR is analyzed by decomposing the overall mission success into the corresponding system behavior in each phase. The system behavior is further decomposed into components' behaviors which can be described by continuous time Markov chains (CTMC). As a result, a large number of redundant states can be excluded from the model, rather than incorporating all states like traditional Markovian approaches do. Therefore, the size of the resulting model does not grow exponentially as the number of components increases. In the case study, the effectiveness and correctness of our approach is demonstrated through the comparison with the traditional CTMC approach. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.