Transient Analysis of Multistage Degraded Systems with Partial Repairs of General Distribution Modeled by Erlang-k Distribution

The paper presents a model of multistage degraded system subjected to random failures and partial repairs. A transient analysis is performed and transient probabilities are calculated to find the availability, the means of life time and operational life time. In the paper, constant state dependent transition rates for the degradation process as well as failure process are considered. On the other hand the partial repairs follow general distributions. This paper extends previous systems that can be considered as particular cases of this one. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate applicability of the expressions that are obtained throughout the paper.