New Models and Measures for Reliability of Multi-state Systems

Abstract

This chapter descibes some new reliability models and measures for multistate systems. Equivalent classes and lower/upper boundary points are used for deriving the structure function for multistate system with multistate components. In addition to the static multistate reliability measures, several dynamic reliability measures are also introduced. Two stochastic models, Markov process and non-homogeneous continuous time Markov process are applied to formulate the probability that the system is in each state. With Non-homogeneous continuous time Markov, the age effect of the system is considered. Utility functions and disutility functions are incorporated with the stochastic models for the customer-centered reliability measures. Couple of potential applications are introduced and used to illustrate these reliability models and measures.