Simulation Procedure for Estimating the Reliability of a System with Repairable Units+

This paper propose a procedure to estimate the system lifetime distribution using simulation method in a parametric framework and also develop the criterion for terminating the simulation. We assume that a system is composed of many components whose lifetime and repair time distributions are general, and repair of each component is imperfect or not. General simulation algorithms can not be adopted for this case, due to the dependency of successive operating times and the discontinuity in base line intensity function of failure process. Then we propose algorithms for generating failure times subject to imperfect repair. We develop the event time tracking logic for identifying the system failure time, and also develop the criterion for terminating the simulation. Our procedure is composed of two phases. The first phase of the procedure is to generate the system failure times from the inputs. The second phase is to estimate the lifetime distribution of the system. The best model is selected by a fully automated procedure among well-known parametric families, and the required parameters are estimated. We give examples to show the accuracy of our procedure and the effect of repair effect of components to system MTTF(Mean Time To Failure).