A Method for Computing Complex System Reliability

The computation of reliability becomes quite tedious when one has to deal with a non series-parallel system. In this paper a proposed method is developed by taking the system as a probabilistic graph in which a component of the system is represented by a branch. The proposed method is composed of three phases: Phase 1 involves the reduction of all series, parallel, and series-parallel components to an irreducible non series-parallel system. In Phase 2 the algorithm enumerates all possible paths from the source to the sink of the graph. Phase 3 then computes the system reliability based on the path information obtained in Phase 2. An example of the use of the method to compute system reliability is given.