3.6 Summary
This chapter discusses imperfect fault coverage, an inherent behavior of FTSs. While there exist diverse types of imperfect coverage (e.g. ELC, FLC, and PDC), this chapter focuses on the modeling and analysis of ELC modeled by the IPCM. Under the IPCM, each component is associated with a set of three coverage factors, reflecting the effectiveness of the system recovery and reconfiguration mechanism in the case of a fault occurring to this component. Both an explicit method based on BDD (called BEM) and an implicit method based on the total probability law (called SEA) are discussed for the reliability analysis of binary‐state systems subject to the ELC. Extensions of the SEA method for analyzing multi‐state systems and phased‐mission systems subject to the ELC are further presented. The SEA methodology enables the users to apply reliability analysis software that does not consider ELC (e.g. BDD for binary‐state systems, MMDD for multi‐state...