Reliability Analysis of a One-Unit System

Richard E. Barlow and Larry C. Hunter
Additional contact information
Richard E. Barlow: Sylvania Electronic Defense Laboratories, Mountain View, California
Larry C. Hunter: Sylvania Electronic Defense Laboratories, Mountain View, California

Operations Research, 1961, vol. 9, issue 2, 200-208

Abstract: This paper considers an electronic system that upon failure is repaired Only two states---the “on” state and the “off” state---are distinguished. The time-to-failure and the time-to-repair are random variables with general distribution functions. The purpose of the paper is to make available, in single unified treatment, mathematical information that is relevant for a reliability analysis of a one-unit system. The following questions are answered ( a ) What is the probability that the system will be on at any given time t ? ( b ) What is the probability that it will be on t hours or more during a given time interval (0, T )? ( c ) What is the expected fractional amount of time that it will be on during (0, T )? ( d ) What is the probability distribution of the number of failures during a given time interval? ( e ) What is the expected number of failures during a given time interval?. In particular, it is noted that “down” time is approximately normally distributed for large time intervals. The special cases of exponential failure with exponential and constant repair are given as examples.

Date: 1961
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.9.2.200 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:9:y:1961:i:2:p:200-208

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().