Complementary Intersection Method for System Reliability Analysis

2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Byeng D. Youn ◽  
Pingfeng Wang

Although researchers desire to evaluate system reliability accurately and efficiently over the years, little progress has been made on system reliability analysis. Up to now, bound methods for system reliability prediction have been dominant. However, two primary challenges are as follows: (1) Most numerical methods cannot effectively evaluate the probabilities of the second (or higher)–order joint failure events with high efficiency and accuracy, which are needed for system reliability evaluation and (2) there is no unique system reliability approximation formula, which can be evaluated efficiently with commonly used reliability methods. Thus, this paper proposes the complementary intersection (CI) event, which enables us to develop the complementary intersection method (CIM) for system reliability analysis. The CIM expresses the system reliability in terms of the probabilities of the CI events and allows the use of commonly used reliability methods for evaluating the probabilities of the second–order (or higher) joint failure events efficiently. To facilitate system reliability analysis for large-scale systems, the CI-matrix can be built to store the probabilities of the first- and second-order CI events. In this paper, three different numerical solvers for reliability analysis will be used to construct the CI-matrix numerically: first-order reliability method, second-order reliability method, and eigenvector dimension reduction (EDR) method. Three examples will be employed to demonstrate that the CIM with the EDR method outperforms other methods for system reliability analysis in terms of efficiency and accuracy.

Author(s):  
Hao Wu ◽  
Xiaoping Du

Abstract The second order saddlepoint approximation (SPA) has been used for component reliability analysis for higher accuracy than the traditional second order reliability method. This work extends the second order SPA to system reliability analysis. The joint distribution of all the component responses is approximated by a multivariate normal distribution. To maintain high accuracy of the approximation, the proposed method employs the second order SPA to accurately generate the marginal distributions of component responses; to simplify computations and achieve high efficiency, the proposed method estimates the covariance matrix of the multivariate normal distribution with the first order approximation to component responses. Examples demonstrate the high effectiveness of the second order SPA method for system reliability analysis.


Author(s):  
Hao Wu ◽  
Xiaoping Du

Abstract The second-order saddlepoint approximation (SOSPA) has been used for component reliability analysis for higher accuracy than the traditional second-order reliability method (SORM). This work extends the second-order saddlepoint approximation (SPA) to system reliability analysis. The joint distribution of all the component responses is approximated by a multivariate normal distribution. To maintain high accuracy of the approximation, the proposed method employs the second-order SPA to accurately generate the marginal distributions of the component responses; to simplify computations and achieve high efficiency, the proposed method estimates the covariance matrix of the multivariate normal distribution with the first-order approximation to the component responses. Examples demonstrate the high effectiveness of the second-order SPA method for system reliability analysis.


Author(s):  
Byeng D. Youn ◽  
Pingfeng Wang ◽  
Zhimin Xi ◽  
David J. Gorsich

Researchers desire to evaluate system reliability uniquely and efficiently. Despite years of research, little progress has been made on system reliability analysis. Up to now, bound methods for system reliability prediction have been dominant. For system reliability bounds, the probabilities of the second or higher order joint events are assumed to be known exactly although there is no numerical method to evaluate them effectively. Two primary challenges in system reliability analysis are how to evaluate the probabilities of the second or higher order joint events and how to uniquely obtain the system reliability so that the system reliability can be used for Reliability-Based Design Optimization (RBDO). This paper proposes the Complementary Interaction Method (CIM) to define system reliability in terms of the probabilities of the component events, Ei = (X |Gi ≤ 0), and the complementary interaction events, Eij = (X |Gi*Gj ≤ 0). For large-scale systems, the probabilities of the component and complementary interaction events can be conveniently written in the CI-matrix. In this paper, three different reliability methods will be used to construct the CI-matrix numerically: First-Order Reliability Method (FORM), Second-Order Reliability Method (SORM), and the Eigenvector Dimension Reduction (EDR) method. Two examples will be employed to demonstrate that the CIM with the EDR method outperforms other methods for system reliability analysis in terms of efficiency and accuracy.


2015 ◽  
Vol 137 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhen Hu ◽  
Sankaran Mahadevan

This paper proposes a novel and efficient methodology for time-dependent system reliability analysis of systems with multiple limit-state functions of random variables, stochastic processes, and time. Since there are correlations and variations between components and over time, the overall system is formulated as a random field with two dimensions: component index and time. To overcome the difficulties in modeling the two-dimensional random field, an equivalent Gaussian random field is constructed based on the probability equivalency between the two random fields. The first-order reliability method (FORM) is employed to obtain important features of the equivalent random field. By generating samples from the equivalent random field, the time-dependent system reliability is estimated from Boolean functions defined according to the system topology. Using one system reliability analysis, the proposed method can get not only the entire time-dependent system probability of failure curve up to a time interval of interest but also two other important outputs, namely, the time-dependent probability of failure of individual components and dominant failure sequences. Three examples featuring series, parallel, and combined systems are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.


2020 ◽  
Vol 143 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Wu ◽  
Zhangli Hu ◽  
Xiaoping Du

Abstract System reliability is quantified by the probability that a system performs its intended function in a period of time without failures. System reliability can be predicted if all the limit-state functions of the components of the system are available, and such a prediction is usually time consuming. This work develops a time-dependent system reliability method that is extended from the component time-dependent reliability method using the envelope method and second-order reliability method. The proposed method is efficient and is intended for series systems with limit-state functions whose input variables include random variables and time. The component reliability is estimated by the second-order component reliability method with an improve envelope approach, which produces a component reliability index. The covariance between component responses is estimated with the first-order approximations, which are available from the second-order approximations of the component reliability analysis. Then, the joint distribution of all the component responses is approximated by a multivariate normal distribution with its mean vector being component reliability indexes and covariance being those between component responses. The proposed method is demonstrated and evaluated by three examples.


Author(s):  
Hao Wu ◽  
Xiaoping Du

Abstract System reliability is quantified by the probability that a system performs its intended function in a period of time without failure. System reliability can be predicted if all the limit-state functions of the components of the system are available, and such a prediction is usually time consuming. This work develops a time-dependent system reliability method that is extended from the component time-dependent reliability method that uses the envelop method and second order reliability method. The proposed method is efficient and is intended for series systems with limit-state functions whose input variables include random variables and time. The component reliability is estimated by the existing second order component reliability method, which produces component reliability indexes. The covariance between components responses are estimated with the first order approximations, which are available from the second order approximations of the component reliability analysis. Then the joint probability of all the component responses is approximated by a multivariate normal distribution with its mean vector being component reliability indexes and covariance being those between component responses. The proposed method is demonstrated and evaluated by three examples.


2011 ◽  
Vol 133 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pingfeng Wang ◽  
Chao Hu ◽  
Byeng D. Youn

This paper presents a Generalized Complementary Intersection Method (GCIM) that can predict system reliability for series, parallel, and mixed systems. The GCIM is an extension of the original study, referred to as the Complementary Intersection Method (CIM). The CIM was developed to assess system reliability for series systems. The contribution of this paper is to generalize the original CIM so that it can be used for system reliability analysis regardless of system structures (series, parallel, and mixed system). First, we derive a closed-form system reliability formula for a parallel system through its transformation into a series system using De Morgan’s law. Second, a unified system reliability analysis framework is proposed for mixed systems by defining a new System Structure matrix (SS-matrix) and employing the Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) technique. The SS-matrix is used to present any system structure in a comprehensive matrix form. Then the BDD technique together with the SS-matrix automates the process to identify system’s mutually exclusive path sets, of which each path set is a series system. As a result, system reliability with any system structure can be decomposed into the probabilities of the mutually exclusive path sets. Five engineering examples are used to demonstrate that the proposed GCIM can assess system reliability regardless of the system structures.


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