Resilience Assessment Based on Time-Dependent System Reliability Analysis

Abstract

Significant efforts have been recently devoted to the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of resilience in engineering systems. Current resilience evaluation methods, however, have mainly focused on business supply chains and civil infrastructure, and need to be extended for application in engineering design. A new resilience metric is proposed in this paper for the design of mechanical systems to bridge this gap, by investigating the effects of recovery activity and failure scenarios on system resilience. The defined resilience metric is connected to design through time-dependent system reliability analysis. This connection enables us to design a system for a specific resilience target in the design stage. Since computationally expensive computer simulations are usually used in design, a surrogate modeling method is developed to efficiently perform time-dependent system reliability analysis for resilience assessment. System resilience assessment is then investigated based on the developed time-dependent system reliability analysis method. The connection between the proposed resilience assessment method and design is discussed through the sensitivity analysis and component importance measure. Two numerical examples are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed resilience assessment method and the associated sensitivity analysis and component importance measure.