Common-cause failure analysis of a redundant system with non-repairable units

This paper presents a newly developed generalized expression for mean time to failure, MTTF, of a non-repairable identical unit parallel system with warm standby and common-cause failures. Also presented is a modified version of this formula that takes into account the repairability of the warm standby and/or switching mechanism. Generalized expressions for system reliability and variance of time to failure are presented along with some tables and plots of system reliability and MTTF.