Efficient System Reliability with Correlated Component Failures

Abstract

Correlated component failures (CCF) degrade system reliability, and hence, these failures must be explicitly incorporated into the reliability analysis process. Several contemporary efforts consider CCF, however, most of these approaches introduce an exponential number of parameters and are computationally intensive because they require a complete characterization of the joint distribution of the components. As a result, these approaches are not scalable and cannot be applied to large systems. This paper presents an efficient approach to analyze system reliability considering CCF. The approach introduces only a quadratic number of parameters and is computationally efficient. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated through a series of examples. The results indicate that the approach is both simple and efficient and can be applied to large systems.