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. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.