Article citation info:on a continuous scale. In such situations, the lifetimes and repair times can be expressed in terms of the number of working and repairing periods (cycles), respectively. Thus, it is essential to construct discrete time reliability models for repairable multi-state systems.The discrete time reliability has drawn continuous attention in both model analysis and problem solution. Bracquemond and Gaudoin [5] presented a good overview of discrete probability distributions used in reliability for modeling discrete lifetimes of non-repairable systems. The discrete time reliability modeling for general binary systems can be found in [4,22,34]. Eryilmaz [14], Guerry [16] and Sadek and Limnios [35], presented the discrete time reliability models for Markov multi-state systems. The discrete time reliability models for semi-Markov multi-state systems were investigated in [1,4,10]. However, most of the reported works mainly focus on the issues of
IntroductionThe availability, as a performance measure, is one of the most important indicators for characterizing a repairable system and its components. For repairable multi-state systems with various performance levels, the availability is more meaningful than reliability to measure the effectiveness of the system to satisfy consumer demand.In the past few years, a variety of methods are available in the literature for analyzing the availability of repairable multi-state systems. Some of them are Monte Carlo simulation [41,42], stochastic Petri nets [19,21], universal generating function [24,32], Markov models [6,37] and the combinations of the above methods [9]. However, conventional availability analysis methods for repairable multi-state systems are based on the continuous time models. In some engineering circumstances, it is sometimes impossible or inconvenient to measure the lifetimes and repair times length of some systems (components) HU L, SU P, PENG R, ZHANG Z. Fuzzy Availability Assessment for Discrete Time Multi-State System under Minor Failures and Repairs by Using Fuzzy L z -transform. Eksploatacja i Niezawodnosc - Maintenance and Reliability 2017; 19 (2): 179-190 discrete time systems with the exact reliability data. As stated in Garg [15], the complicated system has the massive fuzzy uncertainty due to which it is difficult to get the exact probability of the events. Thus, it is of large practical value to investigate the availability assessment for discrete time repairable system with fuzzy uncertainty.
fuzzy discrete time Markov model with fuzzy transition probability matrix is proposed to analyze the fuzzy state probability of each component at any discrete time. The fuzzy L z -transform of the discrete-state discrete-time fuzzy Markov chain is developed to extend the L z -transform of the discrete-state continuous-time Markov model with crisp sets. Based on the α-cut approach and the fuzzy L z -transform, the dynamic fuzzy availability of the system is computed by using parametric programming technique. To illustrate the proposed method,...