Reliability model for warm standby system under consideration of replace time

There are two effective ways to maintain the system to perform a high or required level of reliability and availability: one is spare units for key units; the other is several maintainers for the system. To solve reliability indexes of complex mechanical system under these assumptions, a system model was established, which consists of two dissimilar subsystems in series and each subsystem is warm standby system, which consists two same units. We divided maintain time into replace time and repair time. In this paper, we arrange two maintainers for the system, and take ‘the system in normal states’ as maintenance strategy. Taking high efficiency of cooperative maintainers into account, the formula of system availability, system reliability, rate of occurrence of failure (ROCOF) and mean time to first failure (MTTFF) can be derived by operating the state transition probability matrix. This research provides evidence for further studies of complex mechanical system reliability. © 2016 SERSC.