Reliability analysis of a complex system with a deteriorating standby unit under common-cause failure and critical human error

This paper presents a stochastic model representing two units and one as a standby unit with critical human error and common cause failure. The deteriorating effect of the standby unit on the system is studied. Repair times of the failed system are arbitrarily distributed while all other transition time distributions are negative exponential. The analysis is carried out using supplementary variable techniques and various measures of system effectiveness such as pointwise availability, steady-state availability, MTTF and variance of the time to failure of the system are obtained. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.