Abstract
The degradation and recovery processes are multi-scale phenomena in many physical, engineering, biological, and social systems, and determine the aging of the entire system. Therefore, understanding the interplay between the two processes at the component level is the key to evaluate the reliability of the system. Based on the principle of maximum entropy, an approach is proposed to model and infer the processes at the component level, and is applied to repairable and non-repairable systems. By incorporating the reliability block diagram, this approach allows for integrating the information of network connectivity and statistical moments to infer the hazard or recovery rates of the degradation or recovery processes. The overall approach is demonstrated with numerical examples.
Highlights
Degradation processes are ubiquitous in many physical, engineering, biological, and social systems
To estimate the hazard rate function, the lifetime distribution is usually presumed in a certain form, and is fitted with the lifetime testing data
The previous study [2] proposed a method based on the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) [3,4,5] to estimate the hazard rate function and the lifetime distribution with limited lifetime testing data of the whole system
Summary
Degradation processes are ubiquitous in many physical, engineering, biological, and social systems. The hazard rate function characterizes the failure probability in the degradation processes, and determines the probability distribution of the lifetime. The previous study [2] proposed a method based on the maximum entropy principle (MaxEnt) [3,4,5] to estimate the hazard rate function and the lifetime distribution with limited lifetime testing data of the whole system. By combining the network approach, this study develops a MaxEnt-based reliability method for general multi-component systems. Non-repairable and repairable models are focused to motivate the development of the proposed method The former one represents a network with multiple inter-connected components where the components only undergo degradation process. Different limitations of accessible information, such as the local observation and the one-shot observation, are taken into account
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
