Chapter7: Availability
Course: Reliability and Maintenance Theory
Maintained Systems
Maintenance is defined as “the combinations of all technical and
corresponding administrative actions, including supervision actions,
intended to retain an entity in, or restore it to, a state in which it can perform
its required function” [IEC50(191)].The main reliability measure for a
maintained item is the availability A( t ) .
Availability Definition
The availability is defined as “the ability of an item (under combined aspects
of its reliability, maintainability and maintenance support) to perform its
required function at a stated instant of time or over a stated period of time”
(BS4778).
Common Types of Maintenance
Preventive maintenance (PM) is planned Corrective maintenance (CM). This type of
maintenance performed when an item is maintenance is often called repair and is carried
functioning properly to prevent future failures. out after an item has failed. The purpose of
PM seeks to reduce the probability of failure of corrective maintenance is to bring the item back
the item. It may involve inspection, adjustments, to a functioning state as soon as possible, either
lubrication, parts replacement, calibration, and by repairing or replacing the failed item or by
repair of items that are beginning to wear out. switching in a redundant item. Corrective
PM is generally performed on a regular basis, maintenance is also called breakdown
regardless of whether or not functionality or maintenance or run-to-failure maintenance.
performance is degraded.
Failure-finding maintenance is a special type of
preventive maintenance that involves functional
and operational checks or tests to verify proper
operation of off-line functions, like protective
devices or backup systems.
Availability
Consider a repairable item that is put into operation at time 𝑡 = 0. When the item fails, a repair action is
initiated to restore the function of the item. The state of the item at time t is given by the state variable:
(9.1)
The mean time to repair the item is denoted MTTR. The total mean downtime, MDT, or mean forced
outage time, is the mean time the item is in a nonfunctioning state. The MDT is usually significantly
longer than the MTTR, and will include time to detect and diagnose the failure, logistic time, and time to
test and startup of the item.
When the item is put into operation again it is
considered to be “as good as new.” The mean up-
time, MUT, of the item is equal to mean time to
failure, MTTF. Both concepts may be used, but
MUT is more commonly used in maintenance
applications. The mean time between consecutive
occurrences of failures is denoted MTBF.
Point Availability
The reliability of a repairable item may be measured by the availability of the
item at time t .
A(t) is sometimes referred to as the point availability. Note that if the item is
not repaired, then A(t) = R (t) , the survivor function.
Interval Availability
Long Run Average Availability
Limiting Availability
Availability with Perfect Repair
Contd.
Example
The system in Fig. 9.6 has structure function:
The three components are assumed to fail and be repaired
independent of each other. We want to determine the average
availability of the system. The MTTFs and MDTs of the three
components are listed below, together with the average component
availabilities, calculated by