Title :
Transformation from availability expression to failure frequency expression
Author :
Hayashi, Masahiro ; Abe, Takeo ; Nakajima, Isami
Author_Institution :
NTT Service Integration Labs., Musashino, Japan
fDate :
6/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
The problem of computing the system´s Failure Frequency is reduced to the problem of computing its Availability. This is performed by a transformation operator. However, the existing transformation operator is not practical because its transformation time increases exponentially with system size. To overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes a new method of transforming the Availability expression of a system into the corresponding Failure Frequency expression of the system. This method is based on a matrix approach using a 2 × 2 matrix consisting of 0, Availability, and Failure Frequency in an appropriate manner. This transformation also enables algorithms for computing the Availability of a system to be transformed into algorithms for computing its Failure Frequency by replacing parameters and operations with matrix parameters and operations. The computation time after transformation is linear with respect to the original Availability algorithm. This implies that the problems of computing other well-known reliability measures including, Availability, Unavailability, MTBF, MTTR, MCT, Failure Rate, Failure Rate, and Failure Frequency, are reduced to only the Availability computation problem.
Keywords :
failure analysis; mathematical operators; matrix algebra; reliability theory; MCT; MTBF; MTTR; availability computation problem; differential operator; failure frequency expression; failure rate; matrix approach; reliability; transformation operator; Associate members; Availability; Frequency measurement; Input variables; Matrices; Reliability engineering; Time measurement; Differential operator; failure frequency; system;
Journal_Title :
Reliability, IEEE Transactions on
DOI :
10.1109/TR.2006.874917