New interval availability indexes for Markov repairable systems.

In maintenance field, there are many indexes such as instantaneous availability, steady state availability, interval availability and others, which have been widely used to describe the various properties and performance of repairable systems on maintenance. However, all the present availability indexes still cannot cover some situations which people are interested in. In the paper, two new interval availability indexes are introduced for Markov repairable systems, which is named as an availability with a given window length and containing a specified point or interval. The new interval availability is the probability that the system is working during a given window length and this window must contains a specified point or interval. Their calculation formulas are presented in matrix forms by using the Laplace transform. Some properties on the two indexes are discussed briefly, and numerical examples are shown to illustrate the features of the two new indexes, finally conclusions are given. These two new indices can become the conventional interval availability when the given window length is zero or equal to the specified interval length. The results in the paper may be used to measure the performance of repairable system more deeply and detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]