A Computer Simulation Model for Reliability Estimation of a Complex System

Abstract

In today's competitive world, preventing from probable breakdowns can be act as a powerful leverage for managers. They are faced with large complex systems. Hence, the realistic estimation of the reliability of such systems has become increasingly important and it is a vital complicated task especially in the cases where the system configuration is too complicated to present it via a Reliability Block Diagram (RBD). The focus of this research is on the reliability estimation of the complex multi-component systems; each failure mechanism is deployed from a given failure density function. Hence, due to complexity arises from unknown RBD, current research methodology is set based on computer simulation modeling. After investigating the simulation model validity, an example is examined to reveal simulation method advantages. To assess the proposed method, a typical example has also been discussed.

Keywords

• system reliability estimation
• complex system
• fault tree analysis (fta)
• reliability block diagram (rbd)
• simulation modeling