Combinatorial Reliability Analysis of Warm-Standby Systems with Imperfect Fault Coverage  
Author O. Tannous

 
Co-Author(s) L. Xing; R. Peng; M. Xie

 
Abstract Warm Standby redundancies are used for improving the reliability in various applications requiring a fast system restoration and minimal energy consumption. Warm-standby redundancies introduce sequential dependent failure behavior between the online unit and the standby units; in particular, failure rates of the standby units change after replacing the on-line faulty unit. Moreover, when the system components are subject to uncovered/undetected fault, the entire system fails despite the presence of remaining redundancies. This paper models the reliability of 1-out-n warm-standby sparing systems subject to imperfect fault coverage based on Sequential Multistate Decision Diagrams (SMDD). The proposed method can overcome some limitations of existing works on warm-standby systems with imperfect fault coverage, such as assuming exponential timeto- failure distribution for all the system components or considering only one warm standby unit. An illustrative example is given to show advantages and applications of the proposed SMDD-based method.

 
Keywords Warm-standby system, dynamic fault tree (DFT), time dependence, sequential multistate decision diagram (SMDD), imperfect fault coverage (IPC)
   
    Article #:  1832
 
Proceedings of the 18th ISSAT International Conference on Reliability and Quality in Design
July 26-28, 2012 - Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.