Reliability evaluation based on a dependent two-stage failure process with competing failures

Abstract This paper evaluates system reliability performance based on a dependent two-stage failure process with competing failures. The failure process of the system can be divided into two stages, i.e., the defect initialization stage, and the defect development stage. Dependence between these two stages is reflected in the fact that they share the same shock process modeled by a nonhomogeneous Poisson process. The impact of shock damage on system failure behavior is characterized by random hazard rate increments of the two stages. Based on practical failure behavior of industrial systems, we consider two typical and competing failure modes, defect-based failure and duration-based failure. Defect-based failure occurs when a defect reaches the damage threshold and duration-based failure is triggered when the duration in defective state is larger than a time threshold. We derive some results on system reliability and show that, with different parameter settings, our model reduces to several classic competing risk models. Finally, a detailed illustrative example of an oil pipeline system is given to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model.