System Reliability Assessment and Demonstration under Heterogeneity

Abstract

System reliability is a crucial topic in reliability. A number of scholars have studied system reliability concerning different reliability targets, e.g., assessment, maintenance, controlling, development and demonstration. Recent works refer to more dynamic tasks on systems such as real-time maintenance and control. However, consider the increasing complexity of heterogeneity in related information and types of components consisting systems, traditional assessment and demonstration work are also becoming challenging in many situations and cases. In our paper, series problems of reliability assessment and demonstration for systems with various types of test information and structural complexity are listed and detailed. In these problems, conventional assessment and demonstration methods are no longer effective enough to meet engineering requirement. Instead, extensions of these methods are necessary for the problems with heterogeneity. Note that the heterogeneity of reliability information is this paper is confined in the following three types: heterogeneous component level test information, heterogeneity caused by dependency, heterogeneity in using conditions.

To overcome the difficulties including estimation bias and high test costs caused by these three heterogeneity conditions, we propose a series of approaches and frameworks to incorporate these heterogeneous factors in system reliability assessment and demonstration problems. Throughout our work, we make contributions by either increase the estimation preciseness in assessment problems or reducing test cost in demonstration problems. Simulations and numerical examples are illustrated to verify our methods.

Date of Award	14 Mar 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Min XIE (Supervisor) & Dan Yu (External Supervisor)