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ABSTRACT
In this article, an efficient method is proposed for exact reliability evaluation of a special class of Phased-Mission Systems (PMSs) containing multiple k-out-of-n subsystems, each of which has multiple identical and non-repairable components. A PMS performs missions involving multiple, consecutive, and non-overlapping phases of operations. In each phase, the system has to accomplish a specific task and may be subject to different stresses. Thus, the configuration of each subsystem can change from phase to phase, including its active and inactive status, redundancy type, and minimum required working components. If any one of the required (active) subsystems is failed in a phase, the system is considered to be failed in that phase. The proposed method for accurate reliability analysis of PMS considers statistical dependencies of component states across the phases, time-varying and phase-dependent failure rates, and associated cumulative damage effects. Based on conditional probabilities and an efficient recursive formula to compute these probabilities, the proposed method has both computational time and memory requirements linear to the system size. Medium-scale and large-scale systems are analyzed to demonstrate high efficiency of the proposed method.
Acknowledgments
Part of this work was presented at the 2011 Annual Reliability & Maintainability Symposium (Amari, Citation2011). We appreciate the feedback given to us by conference attendees. The first author (SV Amari) would like to acknowledge that the research work presented in this paper was conducted prior to his joining at the BAE Systems and the opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the views of the BAE Systems.
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Notes on contributors
Suprasad V. Amari
Suprasad V. Amari is a senior principal reliability engineer at BAE Systems. He was awarded M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in reliability engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India, in 1992 and 1998, respectively. Prior to joining BAE Systems, he served about 14 years as a technical fellow at Parametric Technology Corporation. He also worked at the Relyence Corporation as a product manager and reliability subject matter expert. From 1996 to 2001, he worked at Tata Consultancy Services where he served as technical lead of the data mining and machine learning group. His research interests include hardware and software reliability, fault-tolerant computing, dynamic dependability models, and condition-based maintenance. He has authored or co-authored six book chapters and over 80 research papers. He co-authored a book with Dr Liudong Xing on Binary Decision Diagrams and Extensions for System Reliability Analysis. He is co-editor-in-chief for the International Journal of Performability Engineering and an editorial board member of the International Journal of Reliability, Quality and Safety Engineering. He was general chair of the 2017 Annual Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS 2017) and currently sits on the RAMS Board. He received the 2009 Stan Oftshun Award from the Society of Reliability Engineers, the 2009 William A.J. Golomski Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers and the 2013 RAMS Best Paper award from ASQ Reliability Division. He is a senior member of ASQ, IEEE, and IISE. He is a member of ACM, ISSS, SAE International and SRE. He is an ASQ-certified Reliability Engineer.
Chaonan Wang
Chaonan Wang is currently a full-time professor in the College of Cyber Security of Jinan University in China. She has been working in the area of system reliability engineering since she joined the graduate program in 2010 at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth (UMD), where she received her Ph.D. degree in 2014. Between 2014 and 2016, she continued her research as a postdoctoral research associate at UMD. Her research focuses on reliability analysis and performance evaluation of complex systems and networks. So far, she has authored or co-authored over 30 papers in her research area. She is the recipient of the “Shanghai Eastern Scholar” reward (2015). She has served as committee member for ORSC Reliability Society and Youth Academic Committee of Guangdong Computer Society.
Liudong Xing
Liudong Xing received her Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in 2002. She is currently a professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts (UMass) Dartmouth. Her current research interests include reliability modeling and analysis of complex systems and networks. She was the recipient of the Leo M. Sullivan Teacher of the Year Award in 2014, the Scholar of the Year Award in 2010, and the Outstanding Women Award in 2011 of UMass Dartmouth. She was the recipient of the Changjiang Scholar Award from the Ministry of Education of China in 2015, and IEEE Region 1 Technological Innovation (Academic) Award in 2007. She was also co-recipient of the Best (Student) Paper Award at several conferences. She is an associate editor or editorial board member of numerous journals including Reliability Engineering & System Safety, and International Journal of Systems Science.
Rahamat Mohammad
Rahamat Mohammad has been a lecturer in the Electrical Department at Victoria University Melbourne since 2000. He served for 5 years as department head of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at MIT Malaysia, and the A.H. Polytechnic, Nellore, India. He received his B.Eng. in electronics and communications engineering from Osmania University, India in 1988, a M. Eng. Sc. in 2004 and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Victoria University Melbourne in 2013. His research work focuses on reliability analysis of complex dynamic systems.