A stochastic approach for the reliability evaluation of multi-state systems with dependent components

•Stochastic models are proposed for a multi-state system with dependent components.•The system consists of components with steady and time-varying state probabilities.•The models are not affected by the number of components’ states compared to UGF.•The models avoid the large computational complexity...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Reliability engineering & system safety 2018-02, Vol.170, p.257-266
Main Authors: Song, Xiaogang, Zhai, Zhengjun, Liu, Yidong, Han, Jie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Coding
Component reliability
Computer applications
Computer simulation
Dependent multi-state component
Logic circuits
Monte Carlo simulation
Multi-state system
Permutations
Reliability
Reliability analysis
Reliability engineering
Stochastic models
Stochastic multi-valued model
Studies
Systems analysis
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Summary:•Stochastic models are proposed for a multi-state system with dependent components.•The system consists of components with steady and time-varying state probabilities.•The models are not affected by the number of components’ states compared to UGF.•The models avoid the large computational complexity in analyzing complex systems. A multi-state system (MSS) employs more than two discrete states to indicate different performance rates. Methods using a universal generating function (UGF) and Monte Carlo (MC) simulation are primary approaches for the reliability analysis of an MSS. However, these approaches incur a large computational overhead because the number of system states increases significantly with the number of components in an MSS. In this paper, stochastic multi-valued (SMV) models are proposed for evaluating the reliability of an MSS with dependent multi-state components (MSCs). The performance rates and their corresponding probabilities of the MSCs are simultaneously encoded in multi-valued non-Bernoulli sequences using permutations of fixed numbers of 1 s and 0 s. The sequences are then processed by logic gates. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated via a comparative evaluation of a multi-state system consisting of dependent components with steady and time-varying state probabilities.
ISSN:0951-8320
1879-0836
DOI:10.1016/j.ress.2017.10.015