Tampered Failure Rate Load-Sharing Systems: Status and Perspectives

Abstract

Load-sharing systems have several practical applications. In load-sharing systems, the event of a component failure will result in a higher load, therefore inducing a higher failure rate, in each of the surviving components. This introduces failure dependency among the load-sharing components, which in turn increases the complexity in analyzing these systems. In this chapter, we first discuss modeling approaches and existing solution methods for analyzing the reliability of load-sharing systems. We then describe tampered failure rate (TFR) load-sharing systems and their properties. Using these properties, we provide efficient solution methods for solving TFR load-sharing models. Because load-sharing k-out-of-n systems have several practical applications in reliability engineering, we provide a detailed analysis for various cases of these systems. The solution methods proposed in this chapter are applicable for both identical and non-identical component cases. The proposed methods are not restricted to the exponential failure distributions and are applicable for a wide range of failure time distributions of the components. In most cases, we provide closed-form analytical solutions for the reliability of TFR load-sharing k-out-ofn: G systems. As a special case, efficient solutions are provided for systems with identical components where all surviving components share the load equally. The efficiencies of the proposed methods are demonstrated through several numerical examples.