Reliability analysis of phased mission systems with common cause failures

This paper proposes an efficient approach for incorporating CCF in the reliability analysis of phased-mission systems. The proposed approach is based on the implicit CCF analysis method and is illustrated through the analysis of an example PMS. In PMS analysis, a binary decision diagram (BDD) based method is used, which applies phase algebra. During the traversal of a PMS-BDD, our approach correctly includes the effect of CCF, dealing with the phase dependent failures at the same time. Basing our method on the implicit CCF allows us to avoid the complication of expanding the CCF basic events as in the explicit CCF analysis, resulting in a fast and efficient traversal of PMS-BDD. The efficiency of our approach means that it can easily be applied to the accurate reliability analysis of large-scale PMS with CCF.