An unified approach for reliability evaluation of semi-Markov systems

Summary form only given. The aim of this invited lecture is to present an unified approach for the evaluation of reliability & maintainability related indicators. For a semi-Markov processes, (Zt; tϵ R₊) say, with an arbitrary state space E, we associate to every state a performance level, then the accumulated performance until time t, denoted by Wt, is an additive functional of the process. The above-stated indicators are obtained by some distribution functions of the process(Zt, Wt; tϵ R₊) by means of the Markov renewal theory, as well as the joint distribution of (ZT, WT), where T is the first hitting time of a subset of states.