Reliability analysis of general phased mission systems with a new survival signature.

Abstract

It is often difficult for a phased mission system (PMS) to be highly reliable, because this entails achieving high reliability in every phase of operation. Consequently, reliability analysis of such systems is of critical importance. However, efficient and interpretable analysis of PMSs enabling general component lifetime distributions, arbitrary structures, and the possibility that components skip phases has been an open problem. In this paper, we show that the survival signature can be used for reliability analysis of PMSs with similar types of component in each phase, providing an alternative to the existing limited approaches in the literature. We then develop new methodology addressing the full range of challenges above. The new method retains the attractive survival signature property of separating the system structure from the component lifetime distributions, simplifying computation, insight into, and inference for system reliability.