Continuous state reliability analysis

In this paper, the authors extend binary state reliability analysis to continuous state reliability analysis. This extension enables the analysis of both catastrophic failure and performance degradation simultaneously. The modeling of degradation is based on an independent increment random process or a normal random process. Regression analysis is used to estimate degradation parameters. The state tree method is introduced to conduct system reliability analysis for both degradation and catastrophic failures. ANOVA and DOE techniques are used to assess the criticality of product parameters or components to performance degradation.