BAYESIAN ASSESSMENT OF SYSTEM AVAILABILITY - ADVANCED APPLICATIONS AND TECHNIQUES

The statistical assessment of system availability within a Bayesian framework is extended here to consider four additional areas: 1) applications to more complicated availability definitions than considered in an earlier paper; 2) applications to measures of performance other than availa-bility; 3) the use of prior distributions on the failure and repair rates more general than the gamma form; and 4) the use of a model involving nonexponential repair intervals. Under category 1) we consider applications involving: a) a demand for system performance which occurs at a random time within an initial interval; b) a situation involving demands upon a system repeated at intervals; and c) the availability statistics of a redundant configuration. Under category 2) we develop: a) the moment and distributional statistics for the accumulated repair time in a given real-time interval when the rate parameters are uncertain; and b) additional measures of performance in a repeated demand situation. Under category 3) we treat fully the case of a prior distribution composed of a linear combination of gammua distributions; this allows multimodal priors. Under category 4) we treat the case of gamma-distributed repair intervals where both the location and shape parameters are un-certain. The results obtained under all four categories can be expressed in terms of the basic measures for the Euler distribution developed in an earlier paper [1]. Copyright © 1968 by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.