Diagnosis strategy for complex systems based on reliability analysis and MA DM under epistemic uncertainty

Fault tolerant technology has greatly improved the reliability of train-ground wireless communication system (TWCS). However, its high reliability caused the lack of sufficient fault data and epistemic uncertainty, which increased significantly challenges in system diagnosis. A novel diagnosis method for TWCS is proposed to deal with these challenges in this paper, which makes the best of reliability analysis, fuzzy sets theory and MADM. Specifically, it adopts dynamic fault tree to model their dynamic fault modes and evaluates the failure rates of the basic events using fuzzy sets theory and expert elicitation to hand epistemic uncertainty. Furthermore, it calculates some quantitative parameters information provided by reliability analysis using algebraic technique and Bayesian network to overcome some disadvantages of the traditional methods. Diagnostic importance factor, sensitivity index and heuristic information values are considered comprehensively to obtain the optimal diagnostic ranking order of TWCS using an improved TOPSIS. The proposed method takes full advantages of the dynamic fault tree for modelling, fuzzy sets theory for handling uncertainty and MADM for the best fault search scheme, which is especially suitable for fault diagnosis of the complex systems.