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Probabilistic Common‐Cause Failure
The occurrence of a probabilistic common‐cause failure (PCCF) can result in failures of multiple system components with different probabilities [1,2]. Consider a real‐world example of PCCFs, where multiple gas detectors are installed in a production room [3]. These gas detectors may be purchased from different companies and at different times, and thus can be resistant to different levels of humidity. The increased humidity in the production room may fail the gas detectors installed at different locations of the production room with different occurrence probabilities. The increased humidity serves as a shared root cause of the example PCCFs.
PCCFs can be caused by propagated failures originating from certain components within the system or by external shocks/factors such as malicious attacks and environmental conditions. This chapter presents explicit and implicit methods to analyze reliability of systems subject to internal or...