Efficient simulation approaches for reliability analysis of large systems

Abstract

Survival signature has been presented recently to quantify the system reliability. However, survival signature-based analytical methods are generally intractable for the analysis of realistic systems with multi-state components and imprecisions on the transition time. The availability of numerical simulation methods for the analysis of such systems is required. In this paper, novel simulation methods for computing system reliability are presented. These allow to estimate the reliability of realistic and large-scale systems based on survival signature including parameter uncertainties and imprecisions. The simulation approaches are generally applicable and efficient since only one estimation of the survival signature is needed while Monte Carlo simulation is used to generate component transition times. Numerical examples are presented to show the applicability of the proposed methods.