Mean Residual and Mean Past Lifetime of Multi-State Systems With Identical Components

Abstract

Mean residual, and mean past lifetime functions are important reliability measures for evaluating systems' performance. These functions have been successfully used in binary state reliability analysis. This paper studies mean residual, and mean past lifetime concepts for multi-state systems. We evaluate mean residual, and mean past lifetime functions of one unit multi-state systems, and multi-state k-out-of-n:G systems under the assumption that the degradations in systems and components follow an acyclic Markov process which has a discrete state space.