Degradation and Failure Mechanisms of Complex Systems: Principles

TL;DR

This paper classifies and discusses degradation and failure mechanisms in complex cyber-physical-human systems, covering hardware, software, human factors, and their interactions to aid in risk and reliability modeling.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification of degradation mechanisms across hardware, software, and human components in complex systems, enhancing understanding of failure interactions.

Findings

Hardware degradation includes mechanical, thermal, chemical, electronic, radiation effects.

Human failure modes and software errors are identified as key failure mechanisms.

Interaction failures between components are crucial for system reliability analysis.

Abstract

A cyber physical human complex system failure prevents the accomplishment of the systems intended function. The failure of a complex system could be a breakdown of any system hardware, human related factors, application software, or the interaction between these components. Having knowledge about all these three components would allow us to better understand the behavior, interactions, and the associated failure mechanisms of the cyber physical human systems as a whole. In this study, degradation mechanisms in these three components are classified and discussed. The main categories are hardware related degradation mechanisms including mechanical, thermal, chemical, electronic and radiation effects degradation mechanisms. In addition to hardware related degradation mechanisms, human failure modes, software errors, and the failures due to cyber physical human interactions are presented and discussed. This paper covers the main types of failure mechanisms in complex systems and is beneficial for developing conceptual risk and reliability models for complex systems.