Joint interval reliability for Markov systems with an application in transmission line reliability

Abstract We consider Markov reliability models whose finite state space is partitioned into the set of up states U and the set of down states D . Given a collection of k disjoint time intervals I l = [ t l , t l + x l ] , l = 1 , … , k , the joint interval reliability is defined as the probability of the system being in U for all time instances in I 1 ∪ ⋯ ∪ I k . A closed form expression is derived here for the joint interval reliability for this class of models. The result is applied to power transmission lines in a two-state fluctuating environment. We use the L inux versions of the free packages M axima and S cilab in our implementation for symbolic and numerical work, respectively.