Reliability analysis of static and dynamic fault-tolerant systems subject to probabilistic common-cause failures

L Xing, P Boddu, Y Sun and W Wang

Journal of Risk and Reliability, 2010, vol. 224, issue 1, 43-53

Abstract: Fault-tolerant systems designed with redundancy techniques are typically subject to common-cause failures, which are multiple dependent component failures caused by a shared root cause or a common cause (also known as a shock). There are two types of shocks: fatal and non-fatal. A fatal shock (FS) will fail all components of a system. A non-fatal shock (NFS) will affect only a subset of system components. Most of the existing shock models have assumed that the occurrence of an NFS results in deterministic and simultaneous failures of the affected components. In practice, however, the occurrence of an NFS may result in failures of different components with different probabilities of occurrence. This behaviour is referred to as probabilistic NFS. In this paper, we consider the effects of probabilistic NFS in the reliability analysis of fault-tolerant systems. Both an explicit method and an implicit method are proposed for incorporating probabilistic NFS in the reliability analysis of static systems. A Markov approach combined with the Poisson decomposition law is proposed for incorporating probabilistic NFS in the reliability analysis of dynamic systems. The proposed approaches are illustrated through the analyses of several examples.

Keywords: binary decision diagram; probabilistic common-cause failure; Markov model; Poisson decomposition law; reliability; total probability theorem; static system; dynamic system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1243/1748006XJRR260 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:risrel:v:224:y:2010:i:1:p:43-53

DOI: 10.1243/1748006XJRR260

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Risk and Reliability
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().