Aspects of the optional maintenance policy of partially testable standby-systems with periodical testing

This paper proposes a procedure of application of a method, for the optimization of the maintenance policy of partially testable standby-systems, which takes into account the disadvantageous effect of imperfect testing operations to the system availability. The application refers to the optimization procedure with respect to the time intervals between tests and with respect to the mission time of the system in the case when the failure rates during the test interval of the testable and the untestable parts of the standby-system are not given but the composition of the parts and the failure rates of their components are known. As an illustration, the proposed procedure is applied to a simplified safety injection system. (author)