Reliability of the two-unit priority standby system revisited

This paper deals with reliability assessment of the repairable two-unit cold standby system when the first, main unit has the better performance level than the second one. Therefore, after its repair, the main unit is always switched into operation. The new Laplace transform representation for the system's lifetime is obtained for arbitrary operation and repair time distributions of the units. For some particular cases, the Laplace transform of the system is shown to be rational, which enables the use of the matrix-exponential distributions for obtaining relevant reliability indices. The discrete setup of the model is also considered through the corresponding matrix-geometric distributions, which are the discrete analogs of the matrix-exponential distributions.