Estimating System Reliability: Monte Carlo Methods, Sensitivity and Errors in Input Parameters

摘要

The computation of system reliability from component reliabilities presents a host of non-trivial problems for systems of varying sizes. These include the functional relationship between the time required to compute system reliability and system size. A second problem concerns how system reliability varies as component reliabilities vary. A third problem concerns how statistical errors in estimating component reliabilities affect the accuracy of the system reliability computation. This paper describes Monte Carlo techniques which provide useful answers to the first two problems and presents an analysis which establishes the potential seriousness of the third problem in practice.