Reliability analysis for multi-component systems with degradation interaction and categorized shocks

Abstract In engineering applications, system degradation is influenced by continuous degradation and random shocks simultaneously. In this paper, we study the reliability of a multi-component system with interacting components that are subject to both continuous degradation process and categorized shocks. By interacting components, we refer to the case where the degradation behavior of a particular component can influence that of another component. This is in contrast to previous works in the literature that typically assume independence in the degradation interaction in multi-component systems. Moreover, categorized shocks are assumed to selectively affect one or more components by either causing a sudden jump in the degradation level or accelerating the degradation rate, or both. Under these assumptions, we derive the reliability of a series system in a recursive way and propose a simulation method to approximate the failure time of k-out-of-n systems. An example of the MEMS (Micro-electro mechanical systems) oscillator, which is a typical system with interacting components subject to continuous degradation and categorized random shocks, is studied in the end to demonstrate the results obtained in this paper.