Robustness and exponentiality in redundant repairable systems

A redundant system of independent repairable components with general failure time and repair time distributions is considered. It is shown that the system failure time has an expectation dependent only on the mean failure times and mean repair times of the components and not on their distributions. An intuitive argument is provided, based on the time of onset of the quasi-stationary distribution on the set of working states, to show that for highly reliable systems, the system failure time is exponentially distributed to good approximation. The argument also justifies a simple figure of merit for the quality of the exponential approximation. A key ingredient in the analysis is the system relaxation time, an informal review of which is provided.