Reliability analysis of N-policy vacation based FTC system subject to standby switching failures

Abstract

The paper is aimed to investigate the reliability metrics of a multi-unit fault-tolerant control (FTC) system wherein the units are subject to failure and those are repairable by two heterogeneous servers. Server 1 remains permanently available for essential service of failed units, whereas server 2 goes on vacation and renders service based on the N-policy threshold, which may also provide optional and essential services. Server 1 may break down at a steady rate during its servicing period but immediately gets repaired and resume servicing the failed units. When the working unit fails, the available warm standby unit holds responsibility for the smooth operation of the system. The transition of standby units to operational mode may be unsuccessful with switching failure probability. We develop a Markovian model to obtain the steady-state probabilities. We explore computational and sensitivity analysis of different performance measures for various variability of the parameters