Reliability assessment of deteriorating system

Industrial equipment and technical systems are exposed various degree of deterioration ranging from minor deterioration, medium to major deterioration and subsequently failed thereafter and are replaced at failure. Such deteriorations can slightly reduce system performance and will ultimately lead to random failure. This paper presents modelling and evaluation of reliability characteristics such as availability, profit and mean time to failure (MTTF) of a system subjected to three consecutive stages of deterioration (minor, medium and major) before failure. Markov models of the system are derived through the system state transition probabilities and differential equations which are further used to evaluate the system availability, busy period, profit and mean time to failure (MTTF). Based on assumed numerical values given to system parameters, graphical illustrations are given to highlight important results.