An Iteration Method for Reliability Evaluation of a Fleet System

Abstract

The fleet system considered here consists of n identical units (members) which are operated together under an operational program which specifies the schedule of the operation of the system and maintenance performed on the units in the system. Introduction of this operational program makes the reliability evaluation of the fleet system more realistic but complicated. A conventional Markov approach is effective only when a fleet system consists of a few units. This paper presents a new method for the reliability evaluation of a fleet system. This method reduces the problem of the reliability evaluation of the system to that of each unit by introducing a ‘utilization factor’. Therefore, the size of the problem is irrelevant to the number of the units in the system. An iteration method is used to obtain the unique solution of the problem.