Markov Modeling Application to a Redundant Safety System

Redundancy of components and subsystems is part of the design of reliable complex engineering systems used in several industrial applications, including power generation facilities. Such engineering systems may be in one or more intermediate operating states at various times. For example, these systems could continue operating during the repair of failed components and during maintenance intervals. For this reason, they do not lend themselves well to traditional reliability modeling techniques that do not account for a system’s progression through various intermediate states. The use of traditional reliability modeling techniques may lead to significantly different estimates of the performance of a complex system required to exhibit high reliability. This paper discusses the application of a Markov modeling approach for the development of reliability estimates of complex engineering systems. This approach is expected to have advantages for modeling reliability for such systems, since they are commonly comprised of redundant sets of components and require a strict set of maintenance operations to ensure their reliability.