Abstract:

This article presents probabilistic models addressing the problem of assessing the survivability and life expectancy of items subjected to repetitive multi phases usage cycles. This life profile characterizes the operational pattern of many daily used technologies, such as air and ground vehicles, home and services appliances, medical instruments, industrial machineries, etc. The topic was first studied by us in Filis et al. [3], where simple approximated solutions were given for the Weibull life distribution. Here we show that the model can be generalized to any family of life distributions having zero location parameter, and scale parameter varies with alternating working and environmental conditions.

An exception is the exponential distribution for which we show that exact calculations can be performed with low computational effort.