Singularity of Some Software Reliability Models and Parameter Estimation Method

According to the principle, “The failure data is the basis of software reliability analysis”, we built a software reliability expert system (SRES) by adopting the artificial intelligence technology. By reasoning out the conclusion from the fitting results of failure data of a software project, the SRES can recommend users “the most suitable model” as a software reliability measurement model. We believe that the SRES can overcome the inconsistency in applications of software reliability models well. We report investigation results of singularity and parameter estimation methods of experimental models in SRES.

Singularity of Software Reliability Models LVLM and LVQM

According to the principle, “The failure data is the basis of software reliabilityanalysis”, we built a software reliability expert system (SRES) by adopting the artificialtechnology. By reasoning out the conclusion from the fitting results of failure data of asoftware project, the SRES can recommend users “the most suitable model” as a softwarereliability measurement model. We believe that the SRES can overcome the inconsistency inapplications of software reliability models well. We report investigation results of singularity and parameter estimation methods of models, LVLM and LVQM.

Modeling Reliability Engineering Data Using Scale-Invariant Quasi-Inverse Lindley Model

An important property that any lifetime model should satisfy is scale invariance.In this paper,a new scale-invariant quasi-inverse Lindley(QIL)model is presented and studied.Its basic properties,including moments,quantiles,skewness,kurtosis,and Lorenz curve,have been investigated.In addition,the well-known dynamic reliability measures,such as failure rate(FR),reversed failure rate(RFR),mean residual life(MRL),mean inactivity time(MIT),quantile residual life(QRL),and quantile inactivity time(QIT)are discussed.The FR function considers the decreasing or upside-down bathtub-shaped,and the MRL and median residual lifetime may have a bathtub-shaped form.The parameters of the model are estimated by applying the maximum likelihood method and the expectation-maximization(EM)algorithm.The EM algorithm is an iterative method suitable for models with a latent variable,for example,when we have mixture or competing risk models.A simulation study is then conducted to examine the consistency and efficiency of the estimators and compare them.The simulation study shows that the EM approach provides a better estimation of the parameters.Finally,the proposed model is fitted to a reliability engineering data set along with some alternatives.The Akaike information criterion(AIC),Kolmogorov-Smirnov(K-S),Cramer-von Mises(CVM),and Anderson Darling(AD)statistics are used to compare the considered models.

Quantile Version of Mathai-Haubold Entropy of Order Statistics

Many researchers measure the uncertainty of a random variable using quantile-based entropy techniques.These techniques are useful in engineering applications and have some exceptional characteristics than their distribution function method.Considering order statistics,the key focus of this article is to propose new quantile-based Mathai-Haubold entropy and investigate its characteristics.The divergence measure of theMathai-Haubold is also considered and some of its properties are established.Further,based on order statistics,we propose the residual entropy of the quantile-based Mathai-Haubold and some of its property results are proved.The performance of the proposed quantile-based Mathai-Haubold entropy is investigated by simulation studies.Finally,a real data application is used to compare our proposed quantile-based entropy to the existing quantile entropies.The results reveal the outperformance of our proposed entropy to the other entropies.

A new structural reliability index based on uncertainty theory

The classical probabilistic reliability theory and fuzzy reliability theory cannot directly measure the uncertainty of structural reliability with uncertain variables, i.e., subjective random and fuzzy variables. In order to simultaneously satisfy the duality of randomness and subadditivity of fuzziness in the reliability problem, a new quantification method for the reliability of structures is presented based on uncertainty theory, and an uncertainty-theory-based perspective of classical Cornell reliability index is explored. In this paper, by introducing the uncertainty theory, we adopt the uncertain measure to quantify the reliability of structures for the subjective probability or fuzzy variables, instead of probabilistic and possibilistic measures. We utilize uncertain variables to uniformly represent the subjective random and fuzzy parameters, based on which we derive solutions to analyze the uncertainty reliability of structures with uncertainty distributions. Moreover, we propose the Cornell uncertainty reliability index based on the uncertain expected value and variance.Experimental results on three numerical applications demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.

Explainable deep transfer learning for energy efficiency prediction based on uncertainty detection and identification

Energy efficiency is an important aspect of increasing production capacity, minimizing environmental impact, and reducing energy usage in the petrochemical industries. However, in practice, data quality can be degraded by measurement malfunction throughout the operation, leading to unreliable and inaccurate prediction results. Therefore, this paper presents a transfer learning fault detection and identification-energy efficiency predictor (TFDI-EEP) model formulated using long short-term memory. The model aims to predict the energy efficiency of the petrochemical process under uncertainty by using the knowledge gained from the uncertainty detection task to improve prediction performance. The transfer procedure resolves weight initialization by applying partial layer freezing before fine-tuning the additional part of the model. The performance of the proposed model is verified on a wide range of fault variations to thoroughly examine the maximum contribution of faults that the model can tolerate. The results indicate that the TFDI-EEP achieved the highest r-squared and lowest error in the testing step for both the 10% and 20% fault variation datasets compared to other conventional methods. Furthermore, the revelation of interconnection between domains shows that the proposed model can also identify strong fault-correlated features, enhancing monitoring ability and strengthening the robustness and reliability of the model observed by the number of outliers. The transfer parameter improves the prediction performance by 9.86% based on detection accuracy and achieves an r-squared greater than 0.95 on the 40% testing fault variation.

Analysis of an k-out-of-n:G system with redundant dependency and repair equipment procurement

This paper studies an k-out-of-n:G system with redundant dependency and repair equipment procurement lead time where the operating times and repair times of components follow exponential distributions and phase-type distributions,respectively.When one component breaks down,it is repaired by a repair equipment.The repair equipment may fail during the repair period and the following repair is not‘as good as new’.After a number of repairs,it is replaced by a new one.The new spare repair equipment for replacement is only available by an order,and the procurement lead time for delivering follows a phase-type distribution.Moreover,in the multi-component system,the redundant dependency is taken into account.Applying the matrix-analytical method,the system availability,the rate of occurrence of failures of the system,the expected number of broken components,the availability and the rate of occurrence of failures of the repair equipment are derived.Finally,numerical examples are given to show these theoretical results.

Analysis of a multi-component system with double threshold control policy

This paper investigates a multi-component repairable system with double threshold control policy.The system is composed of n identical and independent components which operate simultaneously at the beginning,and it is down when the number of operating components decreases to k−1(k≤n).When the number of failed components is less than the value L,the repairman repairs them with a low repair rate.The high repair rate is activated as soon as L failed components present,and continues until the number of failed components drops to the value N−1.Applying the matrix analytical method,the Laplace transform technique and the properties of the phase type distribution,various performance measures including the availability,the rate of occurrence of failures,and the reliability are derived in transient and stationary regimes.Further,numerical examples are reported to show the behaviour of the system.