Reliability evaluation of failure delayed engineering systems

Abstract

This paper introduces an analytical approach for the evaluation of multi-user engineering systems presenting a failure delayed behaviour pattern, that is, systems whose performance decays progressively after the failures, due to internal fault tolerance mechanisms or to the complacency of the users regarding the temporarily unavailability of the services. The approach is based on the determination of analytical expressions for the reliability measures, e.g. frequency and probability of failure states, which may then be evaluated using general purpose mathematical tools. The paper discusses the rationale and the fundamental algorithms of the approach and presents a set of illustrative examples. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.