Reliability block diagram with general gates and its application to system reliability analysis

Highlights: → Conventional reliability block diagram is extended to enhance the expression power. → The mathematical definition of the proposed method is provided. → For quantitative analysis, how to develop an equivalent Bayesian network is provided. → The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated with two examples. - Abstract: For those systems that can be modeled with perfect nodes and unreliable arcs such as communication systems, a reliability graph with general gates (RGGG) was developed. Similarly, for more efficient system reliability analysis of those systems that can be modeled with unreliable nodes and perfect arcs, a reliability block diagram with general gates (RBDGG) was developed as an intuitive and easy-to-use method for system reliability analysis. One of the unique characteristics of RBDGG is to allow node connection relations of general gates such as the AND gate and the k-out-of-n gate other than the OR gate connection relation of the conventional reliability block diagram (RBD). Mathematical formulations for RBDGG and a method of mapping a RBDGG model into an equivalent Bayesian network model without losing the one-to-one matching characteristic of the RBDGG for quantitative analysis is also provided. With the application to two example systems, the usefulness of the proposed RBDGG is demonstrated.