AN ALGORITHM IN ORDER TO IMPLEMENT RELIABILITY EXPONENTIAL APPROXIMATIONS

Calculation of the reliability of large repairable systems is discusse d here. We first present the background: a rule-based model and expone ntial approximations. The rule-based model allows us to describe very large and complex systems. The exponential approximations simplify the reliability computation, reducing it to the computation of some mean sojourn times, and a probability: the probability of going from the pe rfect-operation state to the system-failure state. In order to compute this probability, we propose an algorithm with the following characte ristics: it assumes the process is a semi-Markov process, it uses an e xploration of graph circuitless sequences, it allows us to use a stop criterion, it is not suited for systems with a large number of active redundancies. We tested this algorithm on both theoretical and real ca ses, and the results were satisfactory.