Survival Signature-based Reliability Approach for Complex Systems Susceptible to Common Cause Failures

Abstract

The importance of reliability to complex systems cannot be disputed as they are the backbones of our society. In practice, the common cause failures may have severe reverse function on complex systems’ overall stability. Survival Signature opens a new way to perform reliability analysis on systems with multiple component types. This paper under takes a research on survival signature-based reliability analysis on complex systems susceptible to Common Cause Failures. To be specific, it proposes the standard α-factor model and general α-factor model to combine with the survival signature. In practical applications, the α-factor estimator of the system might not be defined completely due to limited data, or knowledge which requires to take imprecision into account. Some numerical cases are presented to show the applicability of the methods for complex systems. In addition, this paper may attract people’s attention on the conception of Design for Reliability.