System reliability prediction with shared load and unknown component design details

Abstract In many system designs, it is a challenging task for system designers to predict the system reliability due to limited information about component designs, which is often proprietary to component suppliers. This research addresses this issue by considering the following situation: all the components share the same system load, and system designers know component reliabilities with respect to the component load, but do not know other information, such as component limit-state functions. The strategy is to reconstruct the equivalent component limit-state functions during the system design stage such that they can accurately reproduce component reliabilities. Because the system load is a common factor shared by all the reconstructed component limit-state functions, the component dependence can be captured implicitly. As a result, more accurate system reliability can be produced compared with traditional methods. An engineering example demonstrates the feasibility of the new system reliability method.

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