Reliability evaluation for balanced systems with auto-balancing mechanisms

Reliability analysis of balanced systems has become one of the hot and significant topics in the reliability research field. As a new view for the research of balanced system, balanced mechanisms bring much room for research. Based on most practical systems, an auto-balancing mechanism for a multi-state balanced system composed of two subsystems is innovatively proposed for both theoretical and practical demands in this paper. The auto-balancing mechanism is activated to correct the temporary upcoming unbalance of system by adjusting the performance states of each subsystem and to ensure that the performance state difference between the two subsystems of the balanced system do not exceed a balance limitation. The aggregated stochastic processes and semi-Markov processes are used to obtain the reliability measures, and the related expressions of the expectation lifetime and point-wise availabilities of the system are derived. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the results obtained in the paper. The model and the results presented in the paper can be used in reliability, transportation planning, supply chain management, and other areas.