System Availability in the Presence of Estimating Common-cause Time-varying Failure Rates

Abstract

This study presents a method for calculating the availability of a system depicted by availability block diagram, with identically distributed components, in the presence of estimating common cause hazard, we use the Marshall and Olkin formulation of the multivariate exponential distribution. That is, the components are subject to failure by Poisson failure processes that govern simultaneous failure of a specific subset of the components. A model is proposed for the analysis of systems subject to common-cause failures that are not considered to have a constant rate but that are assumed to obey a uniqueness of maximum likelihood estimators of the 2-parameter Weibull distribution. The method for calculating the system availability requires that a procedure exists for determining the system availability from component availabilities, under the statistically independent component assumption. The study includes an example to illustrate the method.