Reliability models of a series-parallel system with replacement at failure

The paper deals with the availability analysis of a series-parallel system consisting of four subsystems: A11, B, C and A12. Subsystem B contains units' b11 and b12 arranged in active parallel, subsystem C contains units' c11 and g12 arranged in active parallel. The system is exposed to two types of failure. Type I failure is a unit failure called partial failure where the failed unit is replaced with new and identical one while type II is a common cause failure to either subsystem B or C in which the failed subsystem is replaced with new one. Two probabilistic models are discussed. In model I (system without common cause failure), the system has type I failure while in model II (system with common cause failure) the system has both type I and II failure. In both models, the system has three modes: full capacity, reduced capacity and failure mode. Failure and replacement rate were assumed to be exponentially distributed. Through the transition diagram, system of first order linear differential equations were developed and solved to obtain the explicit expressions for steady-state availability. At last, some numerical examples have been taken to clarify the results.