8.6 Multi‐Phase System with Single FDEP Group
Previous sections focus on single‐phase systems. However, many real‐world systems are PMSs, involving multiple, consecutive, and nonoverlapping phases of operations or tasks. Consideration of competing failures in PMSs is a challenging task because PMSs exhibit dynamics in system configuration and component behavior, as well as statistical dependencies across phases for a given component.
This section presents a combinatorial method to address the competing failure effects in reliability analysis of nonrepairable binary‐state PMSs, where only one mission phase is subject to the FDEP behavior. As an example of such a PMS, a set of computers work together to accomplish an M‐phase mission task. In M − 1 of these phases, only local computing is needed (no FDEPs are involved), while in one of the phases, some computers need to access the Internet to access external data. Thus, in this particular...