High reliability and long-lifetime products usually work in multi-stress environment such as temperature, humidity, electricity, and vibration. How to evaluate the reliability of the product under multi-stress condition is an urgent problem to ensure the safe and reliable operation of the product. Accelerated test provides an efficient and feasible way; however, the existing acceleration models have

For highly reliable products, accelerated thermal degradation tests are efficient to provide feedback on reliability information. In accelerated thermal degradation tests, the degradation data collected at the elevated temperatures are used to extrapolate the performance of products at the normal temperature. An important tool in such extrapolation is the Arrhenius model, in which the activation energy

The development of integrated modelling for maintenance policies of multi-component repairable system and production scheduling is challenging for two reasons. First, capturing dependency of this multi-component repairable system is difficult because different failure types associated with different components are under competing risks and their complicated relationships may lead to overall system

Testability demonstration tests can effectively verify product capabilities of fault detection and isolation; however, they suffer from insufficient samples, long cycles and high costs due to destructiveness of fault injection tests, which leads to an increasing demand for small sample tests. The sequential posterior odd test can effectively reduce sample sizes, but test results can be random and the

This article proposes a novel preventive replacement policy based on condition monitoring and imperfect manual inspection for systems subject to a two-stage deterioration process, where the two-stage deterioration process is modeled by the white noise process and Brownian motion with a drift, respectively. The proposed preventive replacement policy is implemented using two thresholds: a failure threshold

In this work, a novel health indicator is developed for the identification of rotor defects. The indicator is developed by extracting features from vibration data acquired from horizontal and vertical directions of rotors. A total of 38 features were initially extracted from time-domain signal, frequency-domain signal, and time–frequency representation. Out of many features, six most important features

Checkpointing is a technique to back up work at periodic intervals so that if computation fails, it will not be necessary to restart from the beginning but will instead be able to restart from the latest checkpoint. Performing checkpointing operations requires time. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the tradeoff between the time to perform checkpointing operations and the time saved when computation

Test sequencing for binary systems is a nondeterministic polynomial-complete problem, where greedy algorithms have been proposed to find the solution. The traditional greedy algorithms only extract a single kind of information from the D-matrix to search the optimal test sequence, so their application scope is limited. In this study, two novel greedy algorithms that combine the weight index for fault

This article focuses on the time-variant reliability assessment of riveted lap joint structure subjected to fatigue. A physics-based fatigue crack growth model that can take the crack closure into account is derived to calculate the crack length at different time under arbitrary loading. In addition, several uncertainties are quantified, including the material, initial crack size, and loading condition

Due to the limitations of space or extra costs incurred, the reliability optimization problem of a spare system is of great interest and importance. In this article, we devote our efforts into the investigation of reliability optimization problem of the warm spare gate and cold spare gate. For a spare gate with fixed components, we first examine the relationship between the component order and the

Aiming at accurately and efficiently estimating the time-dependent failure probability, a novel time-dependent reliability analysis method based on active learning Kriging model is proposed. Although active surrogate model methods have been used to estimate the time-dependent failure probability, efficiently estimating the time-dependent failure probability by a fewer computational time remains an

Reconfigurable systems can meet the changing requirements of system performance by several approaches, such as adjusting the system structure, improving the component performance, and reassigning components. However, it is also challengeable to find a cost-effective maintenance scheme by integrating these maintenance approaches. This article investigates the multi-objective maintenance optimization

Local reliability sensitivity and global reliability sensitivity are required in reliability-based design optimization, since they can provide rich information including variable importance ranking and gradient information. However, traditional Monte Carlo simulation is inefficient for engineering application. A novel numerical simulation method based on Monte Carlo simulation and directional sampling

A Bayesian network–based risk analysis approach is proposed to analyse the risk factors influencing maritime transport accidents. Comparing with previous studies in the relevant literature, it reveals new features including (1) new primary data directly derived from maritime accident records by two major databanks Marine Accident Investigation Branch and Transportation Safety Board of Canada from 2012

This work presents an integrated approach for the multidisciplinary reliability analysis of turbine blades with shape uncertainty, including the metamodel, the free-form deformation, and the Monte Carlo simulation. The multidisciplinary analysis of turbine blade includes fluid, structure, and thermal analyses, which is time-consuming during integration with multidisciplinary reliability analysis. The

Maintenance of railway turnouts is a major cost driver for any infrastructure manager, which performs it based on preventive or periodic policies to guarantee minimum downtime of the infrastructure. Ballast maintenance activities, such as tamping, are scheduled by thresholding indicators derived from track geometry data in agreement with European standards. Current industrial practice adopts the same

We consider life extension models for critical, complex systems with relatively long lifecycles. In contrast to traditional optimal preventive maintenance that usually minimizes the corresponding long run cost rate, a finite number of preventive maintenances are performed to increase the expected lifetime of these systems in an optimal way. The cases of periodic and aperiodic preventive maintenance

Verification and validation plays a crucial role in the new product development process since it is able to assure product performance and eventually determine customer satisfaction. The verification and validation planning assigns a set of verification and validation activities such as computational simulations and physical tests, which are proposed to mitigate the design risks of specific failure

Cascading failures can occur in many technical systems where the components are organized as in series–parallel structures. The failures in these systems may propagate from one component to the other, not only within the same parallel sub-structure but also between different sub-structures. This article presents a recursive aggregation method based on the extended models of reliability block diagram

Modeling of stochastic dependency among components in a repairable system is still a challenging task when dealing with the maintenance of multicomponent systems. With the help of stochastic dependency information, failure of a component brings attention to the components having strong interactions with the failed component. With this information, one can plan the maintenance of components in a better

The newly modified Weibull distribution defined in the literature is a model based on combining the Weibull and modified Weibull distributions. It has been demonstrated as the best model for fitting to the bathtub-shaped failure rate data sets. However, another new model based on combining the modified Weibull and Gompertz distributions has been demonstrated later to be even better than the first model

In this article, the reliability of network systems subject to probabilistic propagation failure and failure isolation effects is considered. Probabilistic propagation failure is the failure of some components in a system, which will cause other components to fail with certain probabilities. Probabilistic propagation failure exists in various network systems, such as computing network system and nuclear

This article focuses on a toroidal connected-(r,s)-out-of-(m,n):F lattice system, which has m vertical circles and n horizontal circles, and the components are deployed at their intersections. This system fails if and only if the system has an (r,s) sub-matrix where all components fail. It might be used to evaluate the reliability of a system with a toroidal structure, for example, toroidal storage

We deal with an optimization problem of planning a maintenance strategy for 145 kV gas-insulated switchgear and apply reliability-centered maintenance approach to find an efficient and effective strategy. In a three-step sequential process, we use failure mode effects and criticality analysis to define the critical failure modes that cause the major failures of 145 kV gas-insulated switchgear, select

With the introduction of reliability engineering, electrical power system reliability has become an important basis for decision-making in the power industry. Two operation cases of electrical power systems are considered in this article. When the system is in an ordinary way, the influence between two system components will affect the importance measure of one component. When some component is in

The construction industry, including buildings and commercial centers, is a dynamic industry with diverse and complex nature, which makes its safety provision difficult. The aim of this study is to evaluate the safety status of commercial centers and their classification based on common features; and to uncover the hidden relationships between characteristics of the commercial centers under study by

In this article, the reliability model and the opportunistic maintenance optimization model are formulated for the preset self-repairing mechanism which is artificially designed and applied to many engineering systems. The preset self-repairing mechanism is first introduced into the reliability model, and a series system consisting of two units is built to describe the proposed model. One unit in the

An important challenge in structural reliability is to reduce the number of calls to evaluate the performance function, especially the complex implicit performance functions. To reduce the computational burden and improve the reliability analysis efficiency, a new active learning method is developed to consider the probability density function of samples based on the learning function U in an active

This article presents a case study determining the optimal preventive maintenance policy for a light rail rolling stock system in terms of reliability, availability, and maintenance costs. The maintenance policy defines one of the three predefined preventive maintenance actions at fixed time-based intervals for each of the subsystems of the braking system. Based on work, maintenance, and failure data

More attention has recently been given to Human Factors in petroleum accident investigations. The Human Factors areas examined in this article are organizational, cognitive and physical ergonomics. A key question to be explored is as follows: To what degree are the petroleum industry and safety authorities in Norway focusing on these Human Factors areas from the design phase? To investigate this, we