Computing availability for redundant flow systems

There are many papers in the literature about computing reliability for binary redundant systems. However in the real world there are many systems, whose economics depend on average availability of flow throughout the life span of the system rather than reliability on one particular threshold level only. Such systems exist in oil and gas redundant flow networks. To best of this author’s knowledge no attempt has been made yet to compute availability of such systems. Computing availability of flow is of utmost importance for the economical planning and design of any industrial flow networks. In this paper an approach is proposed to compute availability of flow in redundant flow systems. The proposed approach is compared with the approach used in the weighted $k$ -out-of- $n$ systems for computing reliability. The results show the better performance of the proposed approach in terms of computational time if the system bears heavier weights. Furthermore proposed scheme has additional advantage of being capable of handling fractional weights.