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FUNDAMENTAL STUDIES IN ENGINEERING Vol. 1 Coelho/Physicsof Dielectrics for the Engineer Vol. 2 Szücs/Similitude and Modelling Vol. 3 Scharf, Lisieski/Amplitude Distribution Spectrometers Vol. 4 Mohilla, Ferencz/Chemical Process Dynamics Vol. 5 Baker etal./Explosion Hazards and Evaluation Vol. 6 Sobczyk/Stochastic Wave Propagation Vol. 7 König/Shakedown of Elastic-Plastic Structures Vol. 8 Öacko, Bily, Bukoveczky/Random Processes Vol. 9 Kubacek/Foundations of Estimation Theory Vol. 10 Catuneanu, Mihalache/Reliability Fundamentals Vol. 11 Boros/Measurement Evaluation Vol. 12 Baker etal./Similarity Methods in Engineering Dynamics, Revised Edition Vol. 13 Baker, Tang/Gas, Dust and Hybrid Explosions Vol. 14 Piotrowski/Theory of Physical and Technical Measurement Vol. 15 Misra/Reliability Analysis and Prediction Vol. 16 Misra/NewTrends in System Reliability Evaluation FUNDAMENTAL STUDIES IN ENGINEERING 16 NEW TRENDS IN SYSTEM RELIABILITY EVALUATION edited by Krishna B. MiSRA Reliability Engineering Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India ELSEVIER Amsterdam - London - New York - Tokyo 1993 ELSEVIER SCIENCE PUBLISHERS B.V. Sara Burgerhartstraat 25 P.O. Box 211,1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands ISBN: 0-444-81660-7 ® 1993 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Copyright & Permissions Department, P.O. Box 521, 1000 AM Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Special regulations for readers in the U.S.A. -This publication has been registered with the Copyright Clearance Center Inc. (CCC), Salem, Massachusetts. Information can be obtained from the CCC about conditions under which photocopies of parts of this publication may be made in the U.S.A. All other copyright questions, including photocopying outside of the U.S.A., should be referred to the publisher, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., unless otherwise specified. No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in The Netherlands V Acknowledgments Let me at the outset express my sincere thanks to the contributors of the chapters, who did an excellent job of putting their ideas together in a logical and informative sequence in the form of chapters on a theme devised by me. The contributors deserve a great deal of appreciation to whom I might have appeared unreasonable at times and more demanding but this was done only to get the work expedited. I have no hesitation in saying that the contributors have set an example of an excellent level of cooperation to bring the book in the present form in a record time of less than a year. I consider it my privilege to work with such a cooperative team of contributors who without bothering about limitations of time and resources were determined to achieve the set objectives. I would like to put on record my sincere thanks for the facilities made available by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, New Delhi and Reliability Engineering Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. The facilities made available to me by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Nagpur during my stay at the institute on deputation, are gratefully acknowledged and appreciated. I would like to acknowledge the valuable assistance rendered by my wife, Veena Misra and my two daughters Vinita and Kavita during the preparation of my two books with Elsevier. Vinita (who is presently at Tampa, U.S.A.) , especially, assisted me in handling the work connected with the manuscripts of the contributors from USA, for the present book and I would like to affectionately acknowledge her help. I would also like to acknowledge the secretarial support provided by Mr. Dipankar Chakraborti and Mr. Subinoy Biswas of IIT-Kharagpur and subsequently by Mrs. Devaki P. Nayar and Mrs. Bhanumati Swamy of NEERI, Nagpur. Lastly, I would like to thank the publishers, particularly, Drs. Eefke Smit, Mr. Erik Oosterwijk and their publication department for all the understanding, cooperation in bringing out timely publication of this book. K.B. Misra vi who acted like a mother They set new trends in our family vii FOREWORDS Last year, Professor Misra, authored a book titled Reliability Analysis and Prediction. This text was an outstanding contribution to the field. One reviewer, who himself had written three books on reliability, gave the opinion that this text "contains the most complete coverage of any book on reliability yet written". This new text from Professor Misra New Trends in System Reliability Evaluation extends his earlier work. Professor Misra is the editor of this new text and also an author of four of its seventeen chapters. The remaining authors are well known experts from all around the world. There are questions raised periodically at reliability symposia and in reliability media as to the pending death of the reliability engineer. CAD/CAE Tools would automate a lot of the routine task now being performed in reliability; the fear is this automation will take away work from reliability engineers. New Trends in System Reliability Evaluation is poised for the future. It discusses and applies new tools and technology to the reliability profession. It addresses : multiple variable inversion techniques, decomposition and reduction, digraphs and causal trees, Petri nets, fuzzy sets theory, Dempster-Shafer theory, and expert systems to name some. It also brings one up-to-date on the latest advances in some of the key focus areas such as mechanical, human, and software reliability. The oft overlooked area of common cause and dependent failure modeling is elaborated upon. This text is exciting in helping to expand the application domain of the reliability engineer. It helps you feel the opportunity and the analysis power that lies ahead in the field of reliability. Professor Misra has also provided an extensive and categorized listing of references. This text truly builds on a comprehensive and scholarly basis. At the same time, the topics are developed in a manner such that they can be readily applied by a reliability practitioner. This text opens up new concepts and frontiers to explore in reliability and will be a catalyst in raising the profession to a new level. This book should be seen as a trend setter. It will be a most useful reference and guide to a practitioner. It intertwines the disciplines of decision sciences with the practice of reliability. It is expected that this book, along with Professor Misra’s state-of-art text published last year, (Reliability Analysis and Prediction : A Methodology Oriented Treatment, published by Elsevier Science Publishers) will form a complimentary set of reliability texts that every practitioner should have in his/her library. Samuel J. Keene, Ph.D President, IEEE Reliability Society 1991-92 May 13, 1993 IBM Corporation U.S.A. Boulder, CO 80301, USA viii There has been a phenomenal growth of literature in the field of Reliability Engineering during the post war period and the old methodologies are rapidly being replaced by newer and the efficient ones. Therefore, it is necessary to take stock, occasionally, of this changing scenario and assign priorities for the future. Professor K.B. Misra, National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), Nagpur, has brought together a number of contributions from well known workers in this field in the form of this volume, which is suitably titled New Trends in System Reliability Evaluation. The aim of this book is to identify directions in which efforts are being made or are likely to be made and those that are expected to revolutionize the art and science of system reliability assessment. The present volume presents an insight into the futuristic development and provides an authoritative coverage of a number of techniques, models and alternative approaches. Prof. Misra deserves our appreciation for having brought out a book, which is bound to be a useful guide to all those interested in the science of system reliability evaluation. I am sure this volume will provide students, researchers and engineers interested in system reliability with a mine of useful information and knowledge. S.K. JOSHI Director-General, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, New Delhi Secretary, Department of Scientific & Industrial Research and April 30, 1993 President, Indian National Science Academy. ix PREFACE As a student of reliability for nearly three decades, the editor has witnessed reliability literature grow both-in quantity and in quality. In 1960, there were hardly any books on reliability and the only journals available on reliability were IEEE Transactions on Reliability and Microelectronics & Reliability, which were started during the sixties. Very soon, by 1970, the number of pages of quarterly IEEE Transactions on Reliability rose to 202 in addition to 500 pages of Microelectronics and Reliability. Today (in 1992) there are more than 200 books on reliability and IEEE Transactions on Reliability has over 650 pages earmarked annually besides the voluminous (505 pages) proceedings of Reliability and Maintainability Annual symposium. In addition to this, we have 1800 pages of Microelectronics & Reliability and there exist at least three more international journals on reliability engineering, which were all started during 1980s. All these help generate and disseminate knowledge at a very fast rate, today. There has been a sea change in the quality of state-of-art in the subject since 1970 and naturally in this plethora of information, it becomes difficult to see distinctly the direction for future growth, particularly looking to the size of the literature available today. Therefore, it becomes necessary for us to identify distinct directions for our efforts in search of better and efficient methodologies. The present book is an attempt to accomplish this task. The book besides identifying the shortcomings of the current state-of-art in the subject, outlines the trends, which will lay the foundation of the future of reliability engineering. Naturally, it has not been an easy task for the editor to select the topics for the book, however the dialogue with several experts in the area and the session on Reliability Engineering in Future held during the European Conference on Safety and Reliability, in Denmark in 1992 helped crystallize the thinking of the editor on the subject and the results are presented in the form of this book. Apart from the introductory section, which outlines the future trends in system reliability evaluation, the material has been broadly organized in six distinct sections. In the first section, the editor has tried to confine the discussion to the sphere of improvement of existing techniques of system reliability evaluation, in terms of computational time and efficiency. The recent concept of using multiple variable inversions in preference to single variable inversion, has been included as the first contribution under this section. Several new algorithms, proposed recently, have been included in this chapter along with their comparisons. The decomposition and transformation techniques have been found to be very helpful and economical in handling large and complex systems. Therefore, they find an appropriate emphasis in this book. Another area which is likely to be proved advantageous in reducing the computation time is the feasibility of parallel processing on the computers. Obviously all these concepts together are likely to improve substantially the art and science of system reliability evaluation. Since mid seventies, there has been tremendous improvement in the analysis of k-out-of-n systems, which are considered useful for a variety of system models and applications. The same is true about the fault tree analysis, which has become quite indispensable for system reliability studies, today. Consecutive k-out-of-n systems, which came into existence only in 1980s, have also been analysed extensively. It was, therefore, felt necessary to provide a coverage of these improvements under the section on Towards Improved Analyses. The application of graph theory to reliability was introduced during late sixties and early seventies. This provided an analyst an opportunity to employ better tools for reliability analysis. X Recent developments in this area consist of the use of digraphs, causal trees, Petri nets and neural nets and these are likely to prove useful in reliability studies. Therefore, a section on these new tools was considered relevant for this book. A discussion on neural nets could not, however, be included due to certain reasons. Inspite of considerable progress in reliability evaluation methodologies, there are still areas in a man-machine system performance, which have been always considered difficult if not impossible for modeling. Failure dependency and simultaneous catastrophic failures of subsystems are difficult to model. There are other areas which have come into relevance on account of an increased use of computers and microprocessors, which often execute several tasks based on the software developed. Therefore, not only hardware reliability but software reliability is also important in system reliability evaluation. There are other areas like mechanical systems reliability modeling where not much progress has been made. Therefore, a section which provides a discussion of the difficulties and the newer concepts in modeling in the important and critical areas like human reliability, common cause and dependency failures, software reliability and mechanical systems reliability, has been included in this book. Each of these problems poses a challenge to a reliability analyst and it was felt necessary to discuss this at some length so that future trends could be identified and a concerted effort could be made in future in these directions. The next section provides a thorough discussion of the new approaches that are being considered as alternatives to the probabilistic approach. The probabilistic approach has not been able to provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of handling uncertainty as there is a considerable amount of uncertainty present in the probabilistic approach which mainly stems from the imprecise data besides the problem of subjectivity and imprecision that is inherent in system reliability evaluation. Fuzzy Sets Theory and Dempster-Shafer Theory have generally been considered appropriate to handle these problems. Therefore, it was considered necessary to include the discussion of these approaches. Lastly, the task of system reliability evaluation need not be confined to specialists or experts and a non-specialist user should be able to carry out the reliability analysis. This is a new direction, which is likely to further develop into a fully grown area and consists of use of expert systems and the use of special purpose hardware gadget, like a reliability analyzer. Therefore, it was considered appropriate by the editor to include a chapter each on the expert system and the reliability analyser to evoke interest in readers in these promising new areas. With the discussion of all these important aspects of system reliability evaluation, it is expected that the art and science of system reliability evaluation will get the necessary fillip and will achieve new heights, in the foreseeable future. Even after this, if any important topic is left out, the editor takes the entire blame for the same. There are three chapters in this book, which have two parts. To distinguish the two parts of the same chapter, the first part has a different script from the other part. Also, at places, different size of fonts, have been used to distinguish a particular section of the book but the same style has been maintained throughout the book. Also the same font size has been maintained for a given section. This has been done primarily to provide clarity and a distinctiveness to a particular aspect or section. K.B. Misra New Trends in System Reliability Evaluation K.B. Misra (Editor) © 1993 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. All rights reserved. 1 CHAPTER 1 (Part-I) RELIABILITY ENGINEERING FOR THE FUTURE Gerard Collas System Reliability Engineering Manager Bull Rue Jean Jaures, P.O. Box 53 78340, Les Cl ayes sous Bois, France ABSTRACT At the European Safety and Reliability Conference 1992, a panel discussion was held on Reliability Engineering for the Future, where, the word reliability was intended to cover all the aspects of dependability activities. During this session, various aspects of the current state-of-art and the new developments for the future in dependability engineering were thoroughly discussed among the panellists and the attendees. This chapter is based on the summary of discussions held during the session and highlights different aspects of dependability engineering activities, viz., product and process assurance management, problems of unreliability in the field, system description and modeling and finally future areas of possible improvements. The conclusion provides a brief description of different domains of activities of the dependability engineering which must be developed in the coming years. 1.1 Introduction For past several years, during the international reliability and maintainability conferences held in Europe and in the United States, various aspects of dependability engineering which integrate reliability, maintainability and safety analyses better in the product life cycle have been often discussed. The word dependability covers not only the estimation and evaluation of system reliability, availability and maintainability but also all the factors and means which permit a complete system to deliver its service to the users for which it is designed. Today, the system integrates not only hardware (as electronic equipment, electromechanical, and mechanical devices) and software (as firmware and operating system) but also its applications, communication links, environmental (logical and physical) and other activities (design, support, maintenance, customer). All these elements are significant to determine the real dependability of the system offered to the end user. During the European Safety and Reliability Conference, 1992 held in Copenhagen, the author was requested to conduct a panel discussion on :Reliability Engineering for the Future. The list of panellists included specialists representing various aspects of dependability and their addresses and biographies are given in the Appendix of this Chapter. Jane Rise of Ericsson Quality Institute (Sweden) presented the Ericsson Process
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