3. Multi-state approach

3.1 Introduction

The classic approach considers only two classes of states – On / Failure – whereas, between the perfect running state and the total failure state, industrial systems generally present a large number of degraded states which continue to provide service, even if this is not equal to 100%. These degraded states therefore need to be taken into account to correctly assess the performance of industrial systems, and this is particularly true of production systems. We'll see how the Markovian approach can be extended to deal with this situation.

Let's return to our two-component example, but now consider two oil wells with different productivities (figure 8...