Reliability Analysis of Phased-Mission K-out-of-n Systems with Cascading Effect

In this paper, an effective method is provided for the reliability evaluation of phased-mission k-out-of-n systems consisting of identical binary non-repairable elements subject to cascading effect. The proposed method considers statistical dependencies of component states across phases as well as dynamics in system configuration and success criteria. The proposed method is based on the total probability law, conditional probabilities and an efficient recursive formula to compute the overall mission reliability with the consideration of cascading effect. The difficulty in analysis is to allow for cascading effect that can affect different subsets of system components, and which can occur s-dependently.