RELIABILITY OF MECHANICAL SYSTEM SUBJECT TO COMMON-CAUSE HAZARDS ASSUMED TO OBEY AN EXPONENTIAL POWER MODEL

摘要

In this paper, a method is presented for calculating the reliability of a system depicted by a reliability block diagram, with identically distributed components, in the presence of common-cause failures. Assuming the components composing the system are subject to failure by a number of different failure processes which govern simultaneous failure of a specific subset of the components. Each failure process is s-independent and has a non- homogeneous Poisson distribution, thus the time between any two successive events of a failure process is exponentially-power distributed. Under the statistically independent component assumption, the system reliability is obtained from component reliability. The paper includes two examples to illustrate the method and compare the reliability of a system with common-cause failures to a system with statistically-independent components.