8.8 Summary
In systems subject to the FDEP behavior, there exist competitions in the time domain between the failure isolation effect (caused by the trigger failure) and the failure propagation effect (caused by the PFGE/PFSE of the dependent components). As different occurrence sequences of the trigger failure and the dependent component PFGE/PFSE can lead to different system statuses, it is significant to address the competing effects in the system reliability analysis. Combinatorial methods are presented for reliability analysis of single‐phase systems with a single FDEP group or multiple dependent FDEP groups, and for multi‐phase systems with a single FDEP group. A CTMC‐based method is discussed for addressing the competing effects in the reliability analysis of multi‐phase systems with multiple FDEP groups.