ABSTRACT
The subject of investigation are repairable systems with series or parallel structure, or a structure that can be reduced to a single component by means of series-parallel aggregation. Systems of the latter type are called series-parallel reducible. The states of components are assumed to be binary, however, the systems themselves are assumed to be multi-state. The failure or repair of a component causes the system to change its state (capacity). For such systems a newly developed method of computing their inter-state transition intensities is presented, where the transitions occur w.r.t to a given capacity c. The computations are based on the knowledge of failure and repair intensities of individual components, from which the so-called system c-availability and component c-importances are calculated and substituted in the formulas for transition intensities. The analysis of thus found intensities shows that failure-repair processes of the investigated systems are asymptotically Markov. It is then demonstrated how, based on this fact, certain reliability parameters of repairable systems can be determined using the asymptotic intensities. The presented method is illustrated by a practical example of an electric power network.
