Comparative reliability analysis of simplex and redundant systems

This paper presents the comparative reliability analysis of simplex and selective redundant configurations. System configurations such as k-out-of-n units, bridge, series-parallel and parallel-series are compared with the simplex system when the unit failure rate is constant and time dependent. Comparative reliability plots are shown for different reliability networks and failure time distributions. As expected, the detailed investigation shows that the system mean-time-to-failure may be a misleading indicator of performance for mission-oriented systems.