9.1 Overview
Chapter 8 focuses on reliability analysis of systems subject to deterministic competing failures, where the local failure (LF) of a trigger component, if it happens first, can cause a deterministic or certain isolation effect to propagated failure with global effect (PFGEs) originating from its corresponding dependent components within the same functional dependence (FDEP) group. However, in some real‐world systems, such an isolation effect can be probabilistic or uncertain.
For example, consider a relay‐assisted wireless sensor network (WSN) system where wireless signal attenuations can degrade the system performance significantly. Some sensors preferably deliver their sensed information to the sink device through a relay node [1]. Each component can undergo LFs (e.g. due to disabled transmissions) and PFGEs (e.g. due to jamming attacks). When the relay fails locally, each sensor may increase its transmission power to be wirelessly connected to the sink device...