A Monte Carlo Method for Determining Confidence Bounds on Reliability and Availability of Maintained Systems

This study presents a Monte Carlo method to obtain approximate s-confidence bounds for system reliability and availability of maintained systems. An existing Monte Carlo technique is described and is applied as an example to finding lower s-confidence bounds for steady-state availability for two maintained systems. Monte Carlo is the only practical technique to find s-confidence bounds for systems with general failure and repair distributions. Complicated maintained systems with exponential failure and repair distributions can also be easily handled by Monte Carlo techniques. The Monte Carlo results for the two examples treated in this paper demonstrate a satisfactory accuracy for the method.