Reliability analysis of k-out-of-n Phased-Mission systems with Phase-AND requirement

Abstract

In this paper, the reliability of a non-repairable phased-mission system (PMS) with k-out-of-n structure and phase-AND requirements is modeled and analyzed, where the required number of working components k and available components n may vary in different phases. The phase-AND requirement implies that the mission fails only when it fails in all the phases. In other words, the success in any one phase would lead to the successful execution of the entire mission. A new multi-valued decision diagram (MDD)-based method is suggested for reliability analysis of the considered PMS. Different from the existing methods that generate the PMS reliability model phase by phase, the proposed MDD method encompasses a fast model generation procedure that considers behaviors of all the mission phases together. The proposed MDD-based method is combinatorial and thus applicable to any types of component time-to-failure distributions. The application and advantage of the proposed method are demonstrated using an example.