Multivalued decision diagram-based common cause failure analysis in phased-mission systems

摘要

Due to a shock or shared root cause, multiple system components may fail at the same time contributing significantly to the entire system failure. Such dependent component failures are referred to as common cause failures (CCFs). A rich body of research has been conducted for addressing effects of CCFs in reliability analysis of diverse types of systems. This paper first adapts multiple-valued decision diagrams (MDDs) for analyzing reliability of a non-repairable phased-mission system (PMS) subject to CCFs caused by external shocks. An explicit method and two implicit methods based on MDDs are proposed and compared. While the three MDD-based methods differ in terms of space and computation complexities, examples show that all these methods offer low computational complexity while addressing dynamics and dependencies caused by CCFs and phased operations.