A deteriorating two-system with two repair modes and sojourn times phase-type distributed

We study a two-unit cold standby system in steady-state. The online unit goes through a finite number of stages of successive degradation preceding the failure. The units are reparable, there is a repairman and two types of maintenance are considered, preventive and corrective. The preventive repair aims to improve the degradation of a unit being operative. The corrective repair is necessary when the unit fails. We will assume that the preventive repair will be interrupted in favour of a corrective repair in order to increase the availability of the system. The random operational and repair times follow phase-type distributions. For this system, the stationary probability vector, the replacement times, and the involved costs are calculated. An optimisation problem is illustrated by a numerical example. In this, the optimal degradation stage for the preventive repair of the online unit is determined by taking into account the system availability and the incurred costs. q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.