The performance of civil infrastructure systems is vital in supporting a community’s functionalities. Reliability assessment of these systems is a powerful approach to evaluate whether the system performance is desirably safe under the impacts of resistance degradation and non-stationary loads. A k-out-of-n system is a widely-used logic model for a system with n components, which survives (works) if at least k components work. Its special cases include a series or a parallel system. Furthermore, a weighted k-out-of-n system has components with positive integer weights and the system survives if the total weight of working components reaches the predefined threshold k. This paper proposes a method for estimating the time-dependent reliability of both ordinary and weighted k-out-of-n systems, taking into account the effects of resistance deterioration, resistance correlation and load non-stationarity, for which a mathematical solution is derived. The applicability of the proposed method is illustrated through reliability evaluation of a representative k-out-of-n system.

中文翻译：

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具有相同组件退化的（加权）k个out-of- n系统的时间依赖性可靠性

民间基础设施系统的性能对于支持社区的功能至关重要。这些系统的可靠性评估是一种强大的方法，可以评估在电阻降级和非平稳负载的影响下系统性能是否理想地安全。n出k的系统是具有n个组件的系统的广泛使用的逻辑模型，如果至少有k个组件工作，则该逻辑模型可以生存（工作）。它的特殊情况包括串联或并联系统。此外，n个加权k出系统具有正整数权重的组件，并且如果工作组件的总权重达到预定义的阈值k，则该系统可以生存。本文提出了一种估算普通和加权k-out-n系统的时间相关可靠性的方法，考虑到电阻劣化，电阻相关性和负载非平稳性的影响，为此得出了数学解。通过对代表性的k-out-n系统的可靠性评估，说明了所提出方法的适用性。