Stochastic behaviour of a two-unit cold standby system with three modes and allowed down time

This paper discusses the stochastic behaviour of a two-unit cold standby redundant system under two very general sets of conditions: (i) each unit of the system having three different modes of working—normal, partial failure and total failure; (ii) breakdown of the system occurring when with both the units in total failure mode, the system is not regarded as failed (the system fails only when the breakdown does not terminate within the allowed down time). Failure-time distributions of units are exponential, whereas repair time distributions are arbitrary. Several reliability characteristics of interest to system designers as well as operations managers have been evaluated.