A new approach for analyzing the reliability of the repair facility in a series system with vacations

Based on the renewal process theory we develop a decomposition method to analyze the reliability of the repair facility in an n-unit series system with vacations. using this approach,we study the unavailability and the mean replacement number during (0,t] of the repair facility. the method proposed in this work is novel and concise,which can make us see clearly the structures of the facility indices of a series system with an unreliable repair facility,two convolution relations. special cases and numerical examples are given to show the validity of our method. copyright © 2012 renbin liu and yong wu.