Reliability evaluation of phased-mission systems with load-sharing components

Abstract

Many real world systems operate in phased-missions where the reliability structure varies over consecutive time periods, known as phases. For mission success, all phases must be completed without failure. During each mission phase, the system or its subsystems may be subject to different loads (stresses) and environmental conditions. Therefore, the failure (hazard) rate of components can change with phases due to the phase-dependent variations in the loads. In addition, in the majority of applications, the subsystems within a system operate in a load-sharing configuration where the total load on a subsystem is shared by all of its working components. Therefore, upon a failure of a component within a subsystem, the load on the surviving components increases. This in turn induces higher component failure rates, which introduces complex dynamic dependencies among the load-sharing components. Further complicating the analysis are statistical dependencies across the phases for a given component. For example, the state of a component at the beginning of a new phase is identical to its state at the end of the previous phase. The consideration of these dynamic dependencies poses unique challenges to existing reliability evaluation algorithms. In this paper, we propose an efficient recursive algorithm for reliability evaluation of phased-mission systems with loadsharing components. In the analysis, we considered multiple subsystems where each subsystem can have multiple loadsharing components. The proposed algorithm is developed based on: (1) a modularization technique, (2) an easily computable closed-form expression for conditional reliability of load-sharing subsystems, and (3) a recursive formula for the reliabilities of subsystems across the phases. The reliability evaluation algorithm is illustrated using an example.

Deriving Job Completion Reliability and Job Energy Consumption for a General MapReduce Infrastructure from Single-Job Perspective

“…Mohammad et al [6] evaluated the reliability of a phased-mission system with a k-out-of-n load-sharing redundant scheme. Levitin et al [7] estimated the task execution time and reliability of a multi-processing-unit hardware system.…”

Modeling of Fault Recovery and Repair for Automated Manufacturing Cells with Load-Sharing Redundant Elements Using Petri Nets

“…The failure rate of load-sharing components can be time-dependent and nonlinearly reduced, as demonstrated in [43]. To evaluate the dependability of phasedmission systems with load-sharing components, Mohammed et al [44] proposed an efficient iterative algorithm that utilized a modularization approach for subsystems with a recursive reliability formula across phases. The algorithm also included a closed-form formula for the conditional reliability of load-sharing subsystems that could be easily computed.…”

Reliability of mission-based k-out-of-n systems with exponential phase durations and component lifetimes

“…There is an active line of research which focuses on phased-mission k -out-of- n systems in the literature. 25–34 Most of these papers 25–30 analyze the reliability and/or maintenance of the system assuming either deterministic phase sequence or deterministic phase durations. Amari 31 and Amari et al 32 propose hybrid analytic-simulation methods to compute the probability of completing phased missions with random phase durations and sequence.…”