Availability of systems with partially observable failures

The availability is determined for the following kind of system. When the system is operational (up), it can fail in either one of two modes. However, the system operator does not always diagnose the failure mode correctly. Given that one failure mode has occurred, the authors correctly diagnose the failure mode with a given probability η and misdiagnose it with probability 1-η, where η may vary with failure mode. The problem is modeled by a partially observable Markov process. Numerical results indicate that a high probability of misdiagnosis produces appreciably high system-downtime