Reliability Block Diagram: Simulate or Calculate?

• Activity Number: 649
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 7, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences
• Author(s): Rajneesh Rajneesh*+ and Peng Liu
• Companies: SAS Institute and SAS Institute
• Keywords: Reliability ; System Reliability ; Exact Calculation ; Simulation ; Hybrid Calculation

Abstract

Reliability Block Diagram is a visual interface to model a system's reliability. A system consists of multiple components, each with a different reliability characteristics, arranged according to a specific design. It is desirable to estimate a system's reliability to know its performance measure. System's reliability has been studied for decades but it is known to be computationally intensive. Even with the current computing power, the computation of a system's reliability has not improved much for complex networks; for example, telecommunication systems, electric power utility systems etc. We will discuss the system's reliability calculation using symbolic expression and Monte Carlo simulation. Both methods have their merits and demerits. In the current release of our software, we implemented the exact computation using symbolic expression. The feature to compute a system's reliability by Monte Carlo simulation is through a non-parametric distribution specification. We will present the use of that feature in this work.