Scheduled maintainance policies of repairable computer systems

Abstract

For systems which can undergo repair, it is common to use regular maintance policies as a means to achieve availability requirements. We develop a solution method to analyze various scheduled maintainance policies of repairable computer systems. The analysis is applicable to systems with failure behaviour which can be modeled by a continuous-time MArkov process, and thus important characteristics can be included in the model. Furthermore, we do not use the assumption of perfect repair, which is unrealistic for most systems. We obtain both transient and steady-state measures. The solution approach is based on the randomization technique and possesses advantagessuch as numerical stability and ease of implementation.