Reliability modeling and preventive maintenance of load-sharing systemswith degrading components

This article presents certain new approaches to the reliability modeling of systems subject to shared loads. It is assumed that components in the system degrade continuously through an additive impact under load. The reliability assessment of such systems is often complicated by the fact that both the arriving load and the failure of components influence the degradation of the surviving components in a complex manner. The proposed approaches seek to ease this problem, by first deriving the time to prior failures and the arrival of random loads and then determining the number of failed components. Two separate models capable of analyzing system reliability as well as arriving at system maintenance and design decisions are proposed. The first considers a constant load and the other a cumulative load. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed models.