Reliability Analysis of Systems with Time-Varying Failure Rates

Abstract A non-homogeneous Markov model is used to obtain closed form solutions of the state probabilities and the reliability of M modules in series where each module has N m components in parallel. The components have exponential time-varying failure rates which depend on the module. If the failure rates are independent of the modules the results are extended to a K -out-of- N : G system and series-parallel. Examples of assuming the Weibull distributions are presented to illustrate the results.