Operation and maintenance of simple backup system

Part of any production process is determination of operational and maintenance strategy for each individual equipment or system according to requirements and performing functions. If the dependability requirements are not met (criterion is usually availability), then one possibility is to backup the function using second equipment. This paper is about standard parallel backup consisting of two identical equipments. Types of equipments (mechanical, electronic, etc.), failure parameters and the approaches in operation and maintenance generate many specific variants with different value of availability. The second part of this paper contains examples that are simulated in Matlab software using Monte Carlo method.