Reliability Evaluation of Machine Center Components Based on Cascading Failure Analysis

In order to rectify the problems that the com- ponent reliability model exhibits deviation, and the evalu- ation result is low due to the overlook of failure propagation in traditional reliability evaluation of machine center components, a new reliability evaluation method based on cascading failure analysis and the failure influ- enced degree assessment is proposed. A direct graph model of cascading failure among components is established according to cascading failure mechanism analysis and graph theory. The failure influenced degrees of the system components are assessed by the adjacency matrix and its transposition, combined with the Pagerank algorithm. Based on the comprehensive failure probability function and total probability formula, the inherent failure proba- bility function is determined to realize the reliability evaluation of the system components. Finally, the method is applied to a machine center, it shows the following： 1） The reliability evaluation values of the proposed method are at least 2.5% higher than those of the traditional method; 2） The difference between the comprehensive and inherent reliability of the system component presents a positive correlation with the failure influenced degree ofthe system component, which provides a theoretical basis for reliability allocation of machine center system.

Reliability Evaluation of All-User Terminals in LEO Satellite Communication Network Based on Modular Reduction

LEO satellite communication network has a large number of satellites distributed in low orbits,which leads to multiple coverage of many areas on the ground.It is hard work to describe and evaluate the reliability of LEO satellite communication network.To solve this problem,the reliability of all-user terminals in LEO satellite communication network is defined,and the corresponding reliability evaluation method is proposed in the paper.Due to the large scale of the interstellar network,a modular reduction algorithm using the modular network instead of the original network for state decomposition is proposed in this paper.Case study shows that the calculation time of the proposed method is equivalent to 6.28%of the original state space decomposition algorithm.On this basis,the reliability of LEO satellite communication network is further analyzed.It is found that the reliability of LEO satellite network was more sensitive to the reliability of Inter-Satellite link and the satisfaction of global coverage in the early stage,and it is more sensitive to the reliability of the satellite in the later stage.The satellite-ground link has a relatively constant impact on of LEO satellite network.

The System Analysis and Reliability Evaluation of Rock Slopes

The principal of preferred plane analysis is a new research view and model of rock slope engineering geology. It advocates that the rock slope stability, boundary conditions and failure model are controlled by preferred planes. Therefore, the problem of slope stability evaluation can be converted into the search for preferred planes and determination of preferred separating bodies. The organic combination of the deterministic model and the indeterministic model can be realized by applying the systems engineering principle and the research model and method of reliability analysis in the quantitative evaluation and prediction of rock slope stability. Finally, the paper presents the case studies of slopes of the Yangtze Gorge Project and the Ma'anshan openpit mine.

Reliability Evaluation and Sensitivity Analysis for Multi-state System Based on Time Degradation Measures

The performance and state of multi-state system depend on its structure and different state combinations of the components. In order to evaluate the reliability of multi-state system effectively,a reliability evaluation and sensitivity analysis method based on the time degradation measures was proposed. The equivalence sets of the multi-state system under different output performances were established. The state combinations were classified according to the performance level. The degradation probability models under different states were established,and the new reliability measures,such as dynamic probability of multi-state system,holding time in each state,dynamic expectation function and integrated expectation function of the performance,were proposed and used to implement the dynamic reliability evaluation and sensitivity analysis. A certain diesel engine fuel feeding system was taken as an application example to illustrate the proposed method. The results show that not only the holding time in the desired state of the components and the system can be predicted,but also the best state component in a certain time period can be obtained.

Reliability Evaluation of Wind Power Converter Under Fault-tolerant Control Scheme with Quantification of Temperature and Humidity Effects

Wind power converter(WPC)is a key part of a wind power unit which delivers electric energy to power grid.Because of a large number of semiconductors,WPC has a high failure rate.This paper proposes a method to accurately evaluate the reliability of WPC,which is crucial for the design and maintenance of wind turbines.Firstly,the index of effective temperature(ET)is presented to quantify the effects of temperature and humidity on the semiconductor operation.A novel method is proposed to evaluate the lifetime and calculate the aging failure rates of the semiconductors considering the fluctuations of ET.Secondly,the failure mode and effect analysis(FMEA)of WPC is investigated based on the topology and control scheme.The conventional two-state reliability model of the WPC is extended to the multi-state reliability model where the partial working state under the fault-tolerant control scheme is allowed.Finally,a reliability evaluation framework is established to calculate the parameters of the WPC reliability model considering the variable failure rates and repair activities of semiconductors.Case studies are designed to verfify the proposed method using a practical wind turbine.

Reliability Evaluation of Electricity-heat Integrated Energy System with Heat Pump

Integrated energy system(IES)has the advantages of improving the efficiency of energy utilization and promoting the consumption of renewable energy.It is of great importance to evaluate the reliability of an IES.This paper proposes a novel reliability evaluation method for the electricity-heat IES with heat pump.First,the load-point reliability indices and systemlevel reliability indices are defined according to the characteristics of electricity-heat IES.Second,the model of maximum output heat power of heat pump at the user-side considering the safety criterion of distribution network is established,and the stepvaried repeated power flow method is applied to solve the model.Third,the reliability evaluation procedure of electricityheat IES with heat pump based on the Monte Carlo simulation is presented.Case studies are carried out on the electricityheat IES of an industrial park,and the results show that the configuration site,capacity and coefficient of performance of heat pump as well as the security constraints of distribution network can significantly affect the reliability indices.

Reliability evaluation of avionics system with imperfect fault coverage and propagated failure mechanisms

Fault tolerance designs are essential techniques for systems that require high levels of reliability,such as aircraft or spacecraft control system.Imperfect Fault Coverage(IFC)may lead to the failure of a system or subsystem even with adequate redundancy.Previous studies of IFC mostly concentrated on evaluating Coverage Factor(CF),whereas the system failure behaviors with IFC have rarely been involved.Failures that occur in low-layer may be covered by highlayer.However,if the coverage is imperfect,uncovered failure will have functional and physical impact on the system behavior.In this thesis,the failure behavior and reliability of IFC of multi-layer systems are studied and a Binary Decision Diagram(BDD)-based modeling and simulation method are proposed to evaluate system reliability.As a case,the failure behavior of an aero engine electronic controller with IFC is studied.The results show that the IFC may impact system behavior without taking the IFC into account,the system maintenance intervals may reduce,and thus the maintenance costs will increase.

Reliability evaluation of the roll motion under the wind and irregular beam waves

This paper intends to study the stochastic response and reliability of the roll motion under the action of wind and wave excitation.The roll motion in random beam seas is described by a four-dimensional(4D)Markov dynamic system whose probabilistic properties are governed by the Fokker-Planck(FP)equation.The 4D path integration(PI)method,an efficient numerical technique based on the Markov property of the 4D system,is applied in order to solve the high dimensional FP equation and then the stochastic statistics of the roll motion are derived.Based on the obtained response statistics,the reliability evaluation of the ship stability is performed and the effect of wind action is studied.The accuracy of the 4D PI method and the reliability evaluation is assessed by the versatile Monte Carlo simulation(MCS)method.

Reliability evaluation of tidal and wind power generation system with battery energy storage

This paper presents a method for reliability evaluation of a hybrid generation system of wind and tidal powers with battery energy storage.Such a system may widely exist in coastal areas and islands in the future.A chronological multiple state probability model of tidal power generation system(TPGS)considering both forced outage rate(FOR)of the TPGS and random nature of tidal current speed is developed.In the evaluation of FORs of TPGS and WPGS(wind power generation system),the delivered power related failure rates of power electronic converters for TPGS and WPGS are considered.A chronological power output model of battery energy storage system(BESS)is derived.A hybrid system of tidal and wind generation powers with a BESS is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented method.In case studies,the effects of various parameters on the system reliability are investigated.

Reliability evaluation of PMS considering coupling effect of functional and physical dependency

Aviation and aerospace system are typical Phased-Mission Systems(PMSs)featured with varying configuration,phased load condition and cross phase failure correlation.The coupling effect of Functional Dependency(FDEP)and Physical Dependency(PDEP)has a unique influence on the failure behavior of PMS.In this article,the coupling effect is analyzed,and the degradation of components is modeled with the positive drift wiener process,in which the drift coefficient is related to environmental conditions and operation stress.Finally,failure behavior and system reliability are simulated.An avionics controller is studied as a case,with the degradation time distribution model and simulation algorithm,the coupling effect and dynamical system reliability can be achieved.Results show that this modeling method can describe the coupling effects of FDEP and PDEP and their influence on the failure behavior and reliability of the PMS system.

Distribution System Reliability Evaluation Taking Circuit Capacity into ConsiderationDistribution System Reliability Evaluation Taking Circuit Capacity into Consideration

Distribution system reliability evaluation using the method of connectivity ignores the effect of operation constraints. This paper presents an approach that includes the effect of circuit capacity. Reliability evaluation of distribution systems with parallel circuits generally requires load flow solutions. The proposed approach combines the Z-matrix contingency method with DC load flow for a much faster direct solution. Three different methods for distribution system reliability evaluation have been incorporated into a computer program. The program was validated using two distribution systems connected to the IEEE-RTS and another sample distribution system.

Reliability Evaluation of Two-Phase Degradation Process with a Fuzzy Change-Point

For some products,degradation mechanisms change during testing,and therefore,their degradation patterns vary at different points in time;these points are called change-points.Owing to the limitation of measurement costs,time intervals for degradation measurements are usually very long,and thus,the value of change-points cannot be determined.Conventionally,a certain degradation measurement is selected as the change-point in a two-phase degradation process.According to the tendency of the two-phase degradation process,the change-point is probably located in the interval between two neighboring degradation measurements,and it is a fuzzy variable.The imprecision of the change-point may lead to the incorrect product’s reliability evaluation results.In this paper,based on the fuzzy theory,a two-phase degradation model with a fuzzy change-point and a statistical analysis method are proposed.First,a two-phase Wiener degradation model is developed according to the membership function of the change-point.Second,the reliability evaluation is carried out using maximum likelihood estimation and a fuzzy simulation approach.Finally,the proposed methodology is verified via a case study.The results of the study show that the proposed methodology can achieve more believable reliability evaluation results compared with those of the conventional approach.

Assessment of Dependent Performance Shaping Factors in SPAR-H Based on Pearson Correlation Coefficient

With the improvement of equipment reliability,human factors have become the most uncertain part in the system.The standardized Plant Analysis of Risk-Human Reliability Analysis(SPAR-H)method is a reliable method in the field of human reliability analysis(HRA)to evaluate human reliability and assess risk in large complex systems.However,the classical SPAR-H method does not consider the dependencies among performance shaping factors(PSFs),whichmay cause overestimation or underestimation of the risk of the actual situation.To address this issue,this paper proposes a new method to deal with the dependencies among PSFs in SPAR-H based on the Pearson correlation coefficient.First,the dependence between every two PSFs is measured by the Pearson correlation coefficient.Second,the weights of the PSFs are obtained by considering the total dependence degree.Finally,PSFs’multipliers are modified based on the weights of corresponding PSFs,and then used in the calculating of human error probability(HEP).A case study is used to illustrate the procedure and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Testing and Evaluation for Web Usability Based on Extended Markov Chain Model

As the increasing popularity and complexity of Web applications and the emergence of their new characteristics, the testing and maintenance of large, complex Web applications are becoming more complex and difficult. Web applications generally contain lots of pages and are used by enormous users. Statistical testing is an effective way of ensuring their quality. Web usage can be accurately described by Markov chain which has been proved to be an ideal model for software statistical testing. The results of unit testing can be utilized in the latter stages, which is an important strategy for bottom-to-top integration testing, and the other improvement of extended Markov chain model (EMM) is to present the error type vector which is treated as a part of page node. this paper also proposes the algorithm for generating test cases of usage paths. Finally, optional usage reliability evaluation methods and an incremental usability regression testing model for testing and evaluation are presented. Key words statistical testing - evaluation for Web usability - extended Markov chain model (EMM) - Web log mining - reliability evaluation CLC number TP311. 5 Foundation item: Supported by the National Defence Research Project (No. 41315. 9. 2) and National Science and Technology Plan (2001BA102A04-02-03)Biography: MAO Cheng-ying (1978-), male, Ph.D. candidate, research direction: software testing. Research direction: advanced database system, software testing, component technology and data mining.

Empirical Research on the Application of a Structure-Based Software Reliability Model

Reliability engineering implemented early in the development process has a significant impact on improving software quality.It can assist in the design of architecture and guide later testing,which is beyond the scope of traditional reliability analysis methods.Structural reliability models work for this,but most of them remain tested in only simulation case studies due to lack of actual data.Here we use software metrics for reliability modeling which are collected from source codes of post versions.Through the proposed strategy,redundant metric elements are filtered out and the rest are aggregated to represent the module reliability.We further propose a framework to automatically apply the module value and calculate overall reliability by introducing formal methods.The experimental results from an actual project show that reliability analysis at the design and development stage can be close to the validity of analysis at the test stage through reasonable application of metric data.The study also demonstrates that the proposed methods have good applicability.

Reliability modelling based on dependent two-stage virtual age processes

This paper proposes reliability and maintenance models for systems suffering random shocks arriving according to a non-homogeneous Poisson process.The system degradation process include two stages:from the installation of a new system to an initial point of a defect(normal stage),and then from that point to failure(defective stage),following the delay time concept.By employing the virtual age method,the impact of external shocks on the system degradation process is characterized by random virtual age increment in the two stages,resulting in the corresponding two-stage virtual age process.When operating in the defective state,the system becomes more susceptible to fatigue and suffers from a greater aging rate.Replacement is carried out either on failure or on the detection of a defective state at periodic or opportunistic inspections.This paper evaluates system reliability performance and investigates the optimal opportunistic maintenance policy.A case study on a cooling system is given to verify the obtained results.

A GMRP Approach for Reliability Analysis of Repairable Systems

We propose here a mathematical approach for the study of repairable systems with arbitrary distributions. The idea is to define a new type of stochastic process, called a generalized Markov renewal process (GMRP). which may describe the transition behavior of the stochastic process at non-regenerative points. In the paper an analytical method for the GMRP is put forward and the formulas are then presented for reliability analysis of repairable systems which can be described by a GMRP with finite states. A signal flow graph technique for system modeling is also summarized here. Finally- an analytical model to evaluate the reliability of a m-out-of- n.G system with general repair-time distribution is developed by means of the GMRP approach.

Dynamic Reliability Assessment of Heavy Vehicle Crossing a Prototype Bridge Deck by Using Simulation Technology and Health Monitoring Data

Overloads of vehicle may cause damage to bridge structures,and how to assess the safety influence of heavy vehicles crossing the prototype bridge is one of the challenges.In this report,using a large amount of monitored data collected from the structural health monitoring system(SHMS)in service of the prototype bridge,of which the bridge type is large-span continuous rigid frame bridge,and adopting FEM simulation technique,we suggested a dynamic reliability assessment method in the report to assess the safety impact of heavy vehicles on the prototype bridge during operation.In the first place,by using the health monitored strain data,of which the selected monitored data time range is before the opening of traffic,the quasi dynamic reliability around the embedded sensor with no traffic load effects is obtained;then,with FEM technology,the FEM simulation model of one main span of the prototype bridge is built by using ANSYS software and then the dynamic reliability when the heavy vehicles crossing the prototype bridge corresponding to the middle-span web plate is comprehensively analyzed and discussed.At last,assuming that the main beam stress state change is in the stage of approximately linear elasticity under heavy vehicle loads impact,the authors got the impact level of heavy vehicles effects on the dynamic reliability of the prototype bridge.Based on a large number of field measured data,the dynamic reliability value calculated by our proposed methodology is more accurate.The method suggested in the paper can do good for not only the traffic management but also the damage analysis of bridges.

Sensitivity analysis and probability modelling of the structural response of a single-layer reticulated dome subjected to an external blast loading

The structural response of a single-layer reticulated dome to external explosions is shaped by many variables,and the associated uncertainties imply non-deterministic results.Existing deterministic methods for predicting the consequences of specific explosions do not account for these uncertainties.Therefore,the impact of the uncertainties associated with these input variables on the structures’response needs to be studied and quantified.In this study,a parametric uncertainty analysis was conducted first.Then,local and global sensitivity analyses were carried out to identify the drivers of the structural dynamic response.A probabilistic structural response model was established based on sensitive variables and a reasonable sample size.Furthermore,some deterministic empirical methods for explosion-resistance design,including the plane blast load model of CONWEP,the curved blast load model under the 50%assurance level,and the 20%mass-increased method,were used for evaluating their reliability.The results of the analyses revealed that the structural response of a single-layer reticulated dome to an external blast loading is lognormally distributed.Evidently,the MB0.5 method based on the curved reflector load model yielded results with a relatively stable assurance rate and reliability,but CONWEP did not;thus,the 1.2MB0.5 method can be used for making high-confidence simple predictions.In addition,the results indicated that the structural response is very sensitive to the explosion parameters.Based on these results,it is suggested that for explosion proofing,setting up a defensive barrier is more effective than structural strengthening.

Multi-Source Adaptive Selection and Fusion for Pedestrian Dead Reckoning

Accurate multi-source fusion is based on the reliability, quantity, and fusion mode of the sources. The problem of selecting the optimal set for participating in the fusion process is nondeterministic-polynomial-time-hard and is neither sub-modular nor super-modular. Furthermore, in the case of the Kalman filter(KF) fusion algorithm, accurate statistical characteristics of noise are difficult to obtain, and this leads to an unsatisfactory fusion result. To settle the referred cases, a distributed and adaptive weighted fusion algorithm based on KF has been proposed in this paper. In this method, on the basis of the pseudo prior probability of the estimated state of each source, the reliability of the sources is evaluated and the optimal set is selected on a certain threshold. Experiments were performed on multi-source pedestrian dead reckoning for verifying the proposed algorithm. The results obtained from these experiments indicate that the optimal set can be selected accurately with minimal computation, and the fusion error is reduced by 16.6% as compared to the corresponding value resulting from the algorithm without improvements.The proposed adaptive source reliability and fusion weight evaluation is effective against the varied-noise multi-source fusion system, and the fusion error caused by inaccurate statistical characteristics of the noise is reduced by the adaptive weight evaluation.The proposed algorithm exhibits good robustness, adaptability,and value on applications.