Multi-Valued Decision Diagram Based Reliability Analysis of Demand-Based Warm Standby Systems with Imperfect Fault Coverage

In many real-world applications, warm standby redundancy is a commonly applied technique that can compromise recovery time and energy consumption in the fault-tolerant system design. It is considered as a generalization of cold standby and hot standby techniques and has attracted lots of research attentions. In this paper, a demand-based warm standby system subject to imperfect fault coverage is studied. The demand-based system consists of components with different capacities and fails if the cumulative capacity of working components is lower than the desired system demand. To adapt to different fault covering mechanisms, this paper considers two different kinds of fault coverage models, i.e. element level coverage and fault level coverage. A multi-valued decision diagram based approach is proposed to analyze the system reliability. The suggested method is combinatorial and has no limitation on the type of time-to-failure distributions for system components. An example is presented to illustrate the application and advantage of the proposed method.