Reliability analysis of general phased mission systems with a new survival signature

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel survival signature-based methodology for reliability analysis of general phased mission systems, accommodating complex structures, component lifetime distributions, and phase-skipping, thus enhancing interpretability and computational efficiency.

Contribution

It develops a new approach using survival signatures for PMS reliability analysis, capable of handling diverse component types, arbitrary structures, and phase-skipping, which was previously challenging.

Findings

Provides a new survival signature-based method for PMS reliability analysis.

Enables analysis of systems with arbitrary structures and component lifetime distributions.

Simplifies computation and improves interpretability of reliability assessments.

Abstract

It is often difficult for a phased mission system (PMS) to be highly reliable, because this entails achieving high reliability in every phase of operation. Consequently, reliability analysis of such systems is of critical importance. However, efficient and interpretable analysis of PMSs enabling general component lifetime distributions, arbitrary structures, and the possibility that components skip phases has been an open problem. In this paper, we show that the survival signature can be used for reliability analysis of PMSs with similar types of component in each phase, providing an alternative to the existing limited approaches in the literature. We then develop new methodology addressing the full range of challenges above. The new method retains the attractive survival signature property of separating the system structure from the component lifetime distributions, simplifying computation, insight into, and inference for system reliability.