The up and down distributions of a Wheatstone bridge
Abstract Algorithms have been derived to calculate the overall and terminal reliabilities of a simple bridge when it reaches the steady state. However, nothing has been done in the continuous time domain. In this paper, a method is derived to determine the steady state distribution of the terminal operating and repairing time of a Wheatstone bridge when all links are independent and each link is under an alternative sequence of being operative and inoperative. Hence, the mean time to fail and mean time to repair can be determined. A lower bound for the mean time to first down time can also be obtained.