Reliability Analysis of MS-PM System Based on Failure Mechanism Accumulation Method

Complicated systems are always required to perform different missions each of which may include several phases. Meanwhile, these systems and their components can get exhausted and deteriorated during the operating processes, which drives systems and components into different states. These systems, which is in possession of the characteristics of multiple states and phased missions simultaneously, are called multi-state and phased-mission systems (MS-PMSs). During the last decade, some scholars have made considerable efforts to study the analyzing methods to the reliability of MS-PMSs. However, compared with the independent researches into multi-state systems or phased-mission systems, the achievement of MS-PMSs is still insufficient. Besides, these studies focused on the modeling methods to the MS-PMSs from the system level and the failure behavior was seldom mentioned. In this paper, by extending our previous studies, two accumulating rules of failure mechanism are provided and a revised hierarchical BDD-based method is proposed to model and analyze the reliability of MS-PMSs. Finally, a simplified realistic example is given to illustrate the using of the proposed method.