Reliability and importance analysis of uncertain system with common cause failures based on survival signature

Jinhua Mi, Michael Beer, Yan-Feng Li, Matteo Broggi and Yuhua Cheng

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2020, vol. 201, issue C

Abstract: Redundant design has become the commonly used technique for ensuring the reliability of complex systems, which calls for great concern to common cause failure problems in such systems. Incomplete data in combination with vague judgments from experts introduce imprecision and epistemic uncertainties in the performance characterization of components. These issues need to be taken into account for assessing the system reliability. In this paper, a comprehensive reliability assessment method is presented by adopting the concept of survival signature to estimate the reliability of complex systems with multiple types of components. Particular attention is devoted to common cause failures (CCFs), which are modeled and quantified by decomposed partial α-decomposition method. Uncertainties caused by incomplete data for CCF events are reduced by hierarchical Bayesian inference. The component importance measure is enhanced to assess the importance of various possible CCF scenarios and to identify their potential impact on system reliability. The presented method is used to analyze the reliability of a dual-axis pointing mechanism for communication satellite, which is a commonly used satellite antenna control mechanism. The engineering application demonstrates the effectiveness of the method.

Keywords: Reliability analysis; Survival signature; Common cause failure; Hierarchical Bayesian inference; Epistemic uncertainty; Dual-axis pointing mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:201:y:2020:i:c:s0951832020304890

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2020.106988

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