Reliability of maintained systems under a semi-Markov setting

A semi-Markov setting is considered in order to study the main dependability measures of a repairable continuous time system under the hypothesis that the evolution in time of its components is described by a continuous time semi-Markov process. Moreover, the main dependability measures of a periodically maintained system are studied. Finally, all the above systems are compared with the corresponding Markov systems where the general repair time distribution is replaced by the exponential distribution with the same mean which is the most commonly used approximation of the original system in practice.