This paper analyzes the competing and dependent failure processes for multi-state systems suffering from four typical random shocks. Reliability analysis for discrete degradation is conducted by explicitly modeling the state transition characteristics. Semi-Markov model is employed to explore how the system vulnerability and potential transition gap affect the state residence time. The failure dependence is specified as that random shocks can not only lead to different abrupt failures but also cause sudden changes on the state transition probabilities, making it easier for the system to stay at the degraded states. Reliability functions for all the exposed failure processes are presented based on the corresponding mechanisms. Interactions between different failure processes are also taken into account to evaluate the actual reliability levels in the context of degradation and distinct random shocks. An illustrative example of a multi-state air conditioning system is studied to demonstrate how the proposed method can be applied to the engineering practice.

中文翻译：

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受不同随机冲击影响的多状态系统的可靠性分析

本文分析了遭受四种典型随机冲击的多状态系统的竞争和依赖失效过程。离散退化的可靠性分析是通过对状态转换特性进行显式建模来进行的。采用半马尔可夫模型探索系统脆弱性和潜在转换间隙如何影响状态停留时间。失效相关性被指定为随机冲击不仅会导致不同的突然失效，还会引起状态转移概率的突然变化，使系统更容易停留在退化状态。所有暴露的故障过程的可靠性函数都是基于相应的机制呈现的。不同故障过程之间的相互作用也被考虑在内，以评估退化和不同随机冲击背景下的实际可靠性水平。研究了多状态空调系统的说明性示例，以展示所提出的方法如何应用于工程实践。