Patent ID: 7958072
Filing Date: 2011-06-07
Classification: G06F

Abstract:
1. A method of calculating an availability of a system made up of components, said method comprising: (a) receiving, in a user interface system having a processor, system details regarding the components and an availability of the respective components, wherein the received availability of the respective components is associated with a total operating time without failure of the respective components, which is expressed using at least one of a mean time to failure, a mean time to repair and a mean time to attend associated with the respective components; (b) receiving, in the user interface system, system details defining the interrelationship of the components as having a tree structure of nodes with the system represented as a parent node, the components as component nodes, and intermediate nodes between the parent node and the child component nodes, wherein the intermediate nodes represent groupings of component nodes; (c) calculating, by the processor, the availability of the nodes in the tree structure using the received system details with the component nodes as bases for calculating the availability of the intermediate nodes and the parent node; (d) receiving, in the user interface system, a required availability figure for the system and ascribing it to the parent node; (e) calculating, by the processor, the required availability of nodes in the tree structure using the required availability value ascribed to the parent node as a basis for calculating the required availability of each node adjacent to the parent node by calculating the required availability of each adjacent node on the assumption that each adjacent node is equally reliable, and repeating the calculation until the required availability is calculated for a plurality of the nodes in the tree structure; and (f) outputting the calculated availability and the calculated required availability of the plurality of the nodes.