Using Survival Signature to Analyze Availability of Repairable System

Repairable system is generally dealt by Markov modeling method. But the state space will exponentially explode with increasing number of components. Thus, a newly emerging concept, survival signature, is utilized in this paper to help reduce state space in Markov modeling. On the basis of that, mathematical expressions of availability for repairable system consisting of homogenous components as well as system of heterogeneous components are derived. The final cases demonstrate the application of this method and the method is proved to be efficiency.