REDUNDANCY OPTIMIZATION FOR A SYSTEM COMPRISING ONE OPERATIVE UNIT AND N WARM STANDBY UNITS WITH SWITCHING TIME.

The failure of a system with a single operative unit may lead to various types of losses including goodwill loss, non- production, revenue loss, etc. and, therefore, standby units are required to be used to decrease the downtime and avoid various types of losses. One may also keep in view that if cold standby units are used, the operation of the system gets delayed due to the requirement of activation time for making the standby unit operative and hence reducing the downtime. One may think of having warm standby units instead of cold standby units. Thus, a system comprising one operational unit and N warm standby units have been dealt with in the present paper with the provision of switching time for converting standby unit to operative one. Further, the question of as to how many such standby units should be used also needs to be addressed. Keeping this in view, an optimum analysis has been carried out besides finding other essential measures of system effectiveness. The value of N has been optimised using the regenerating point technique while also obtaining various kinds of performability measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]