Reliability assessment of multi-state phased mission system with non-repairable multi-state components

Abstract

• A MMDD algorithm for PMS and a PMS-MMDD model are proposed to model the non-repairable multi-state phased-mission system. • A Markov renewal equation-based method is proposed to evaluate system probabilities with non-exponential distributions. • The comparison to the Monte Carlo simulation method illustrate the computation accuracy and efficiency of the proposed methods. • An attitude and orbit control system in spacecraft is studied as a practical example to illustrate the proposed methods. Phased mission systems (PMSs) like satellites and spacecraft perform their functions over non-overlapping mission periods, called phases. One of the challenges in assessing reliability of PMSs comes from considering the s -dependence among phases, and the consideration on the multi-state behavior of components and systems makes the reliability analysis even more difficult. To effectively address this problem, a multi-state multivalued decision diagram algorithm for PMS and a multi-state multi-valued decision diagram model for phased mission system (PMS-MMDD) method is developed for the reliability modelling of non-repairable multi-state components. Based on the Semi-Markov process, a Markov renewal equation-based method is developed to deal with non-exponential multi-state components and a numerical method, the trapezoidal integration method, is used to compute the complex integrals in the path probability evaluation. A case study of a multi-state attitude and orbit control system in a spacecraft is analyzed to illustrate the proposed PMS-MMDD model and the Markov renewal equation-based evaluation method. The accuracy and computation efficiency of the proposed method are verified by the Monte Carlo simulation method.