Reliability analysis for devices subject to competing failure processes based on chance theory

Abstract

This paper studies the reliability for devices subject to independent competing failure processes of degradation and shocks in an uncertain random environment. The continuous degradation is governed by an uncertain process, and external shocks arrive according to an uncertain random renewal reward process, in which the inter-arrival times of shocks and the shock sizes are assumed to be random variables and uncertain variables, respectively. The device reliability is defined as the chance measure that the uncertain degradation signals do not exceed a soft failure threshold L, and the uncertain random shocks do not cause the device failure. The device reliability is obtained by employing chance theory under four different shock patterns. Finally, a case study on a gas insulated transmission line is carried out to show the implementation of the proposed model.