AVAILABILITY ANALYSIS FOR A MULTI-COMPONENT SYSTEM WITH DIFFERENT K-OUT-OF-N:G WARM STANDBY SUBSYSTEMS SUBJECT TO SUSPENDED ANIMATION

Industrial equipment or systems are usually constructed as a multi-component series system with k-out-of-n:G subsystems to fulfill a specified function. As a common type of standby, warm standby is considered in the multi-component series system with k-out-of-n:G standby subsystems. When a subsystem fails, the non-failed subsystems are shut off and cannot fail, which is defined as suspended animation (SA). If the SA is ignored the non-failed subsystems are assumed to keep working in the SA time, which will cause inaccuracy in the availability analysis for the system. In this paper; we focus on the SA to construct an availability model for a multi-component series system with k-out-of-n:G warm standby subsystems. Multiple continuous time Markov chains are constructed to model the system availability. A Monte Carlo simulation has been carried out to verify our method. Several interesting findings are obtained. 1) The failure rates of subsystems with SA and their limits are derived. 2) The closed-form expressions for the stationary availability of the system and subsystems, mean time to failure, mean time to repair and .stationary failure frequency are obtained considering SA. 3) The system stationary availability is a monotone function for its parameters. 4) The SA effect on the stationary availability should be emphasized in two cases, one is both the value n/k and the failure rate of active components in a k-out-of-n subsystem are relatively large or small, the other is both the value of n/k and the repair rate are relatively small.