Reliability Analysis in Complex system:

A Review
R. Parthiban
Department of Industrial Engineering,
College of Engineering, Anna University,
Chennai, India.
parthi_master@yahoo.co.in

A. Madhi
Department of Industrial Engineering,
College of Engineering, Anna University,
Chennai, India.
madhiarunachalam@yahoo.com

T. Paul Robert
Department of Industrial Engineering,
College of Engineering, Anna University,
Chennai, India.
prpaul@annauniv.edu

Abstract
Purpose The objective of the paper is to present the research ideas pertaining to the area of
reliability analysis in the complex system such as Aircraft, Nuclear power plants, oil and gas industry,
marine, manufacturing industries, etc., as found in the literature in order to help the practitioners to
develop actions to mitigate their effect on the system.
Survey motivation The article reviews and examines several existing approaches to arrive at a
structure on facts and issues in reliability analysis by addressing the task complexity, redundancy
allocation in the engineering sector using the published literature.
Findings & Practical Difficulties Technological innovation cannot eliminate the risk of failures
during its service hours in complex sytem operation. However, in an attempt to reduce the failures,
researchers are identifying the best fit models to evaluate and validate the reliability of the system.
Scope of the work - The complex industry faces challenging issues in managing risk to improve the
reliability of the system. In the aspect of improving complex system reliability, researchers have
already developed various models to identify crucial factors that attribute to risk and quantify the
errors that lead to undesirable situations. In view of the large uncertainty inherent in modeling
complex system, tools such as Bayesian Network, Fuzzy logic, Petrinet etc. are being adopted for
uncertainty estimation in reliability analysis. This paper provide a framework on reliability analysis
that will be useful to researchers, reliability engineers and other professionals working with safety to
understand the importance of complex system reliability modelling and identify ways to reduce the
failures in future especially in the field of engineering sector.
Keywords Reliability, Aircraft, Nuclear, Marine industry, complex system, uncertainty
1.

INTRODUCTION
Reliability, availability, maintainability and supportability analysis is an important step in the
design and operation of production processes and technology. Historical data such as time between
failures and time to repairs play an important role in such analysis. The data must reflect the conditions
that equipment has experienced during its operating time. Making the right decision with respect to the
design, operation and maintenance of a process and technology requires having accrued a prediction of
the failure time, repair time, failure causes, failure model, and failure mechanism. This can be achieved
by an effective reliability, availability, maintainability and supportability (RAMS) analysis, which rely
greatly on historical data. The historical data can be related to the degradation processes, failure

mechanism and repair process at the component level or the interconnections between the different
components at the system level(Barabadi, Tobias Gudmestad, and Barabady 2015)
2.
3.
4.

A perspective on the needs, issues, enablers of Reliability in complex system

i. Failure rate-MTBF,MTTR
Existing papers on reliability
Application Areas
Electrical system

Aircraft Industry
Nuclear Industry
Construction sector

Authors
(Brien, Ijumba, and Saha
2015)

Contributions
Stochastic augmentation modeling of reliabilitycentred maintenance offers a cost effective riskpriority-screening model for transformers applied
prior to rigorous testing and inspection procedures
on individual items.

(Chojaczyk et al. 2015)

Survey on the development and use of Artificial

Neural Network (ANN) models in structural
reliability analysis

5.

Problem areas, types of solutions, tools/techniques- in different sector

3.1 Key areas to be considered in evaluating the reliability
3.1.1
Series parallel system
3.1.2
Multi state system
3.1.3
Redundancy
3.1.4
Data collection
3.1.4.1 Uncertainty
3.1.4.2 Distribution for failure analysis
3.2 Basic Reliability tools
3.2.1
Fault trees/Event trees
3.2.2
FMEA/FMECA
3.2.3
Fuzzy logic
6. Empirical research/case studies
5.1 Accident investigation
5.2 Risk Assessment studies
5.3 Expert judgments
7. Measures/metrics, benchmarking, best practices in Emerging models
6.1 Simulation model
6.2 PETRINET model
6.3 Bayesian Network
6.4 Expert elicitation model
8. Approach, prioritization, continuous improvement, knowledge management
9. Establishing the Strategies/standards
10. Design/implementation of Best fit model
11. Conclusion
1.

INTRODUCTION
Case studies

Authors

Quantification
methods

Technique
used

notes

Failure
distribution

Future work

Avionics
FullDuplex Switched
Ethernet (AFDX)
of Airbus A380

Hybrid vehicle

(Li et al.
2015)

(Mirhakimi
and Karimi
2014)

AHP to
allocate basic
reliability goal
for the
subsystem

Monte carlo
and analytical
method, Advisory
Group on the
Reliability of
Electronic
Equipment
(AGREE)
allocation
method
Fuzzy logic

(Liu, Tan,
and Leng
2015)

Simulation,
UGF for
reliability
analysis .

Control of the
Movable
Surfaces (CMS)
subsystem of the
aircraft

(Tiassou et
al. 2013)

Stochastic
Activity
Networks for
building meta
model

a.Automobile
front axle
b.Roof truss
c. A planar tenbar structure
OKUMA vertical
three axis
milling machine

(Zhang, Lu,
and Wang
2015)

Flotation circuit
of mineral
processing plant

(Abou
2010)

Lithium ion
battery pack

(Liu et al.
2014)

Monte Carlo
simulation for
reliability
analysis
Fuzzy set
theory

UGF

Reliaility
calculation and
rel. allocation
are carried out.
Time
complexity is
considered in
both

A fault tolerant
system is built
using hardware
redundancy
Two
battery
packs I and II
are studied and
compared

modeling
approach
for
building
a
stochastic
dependability
model to assess
the operational
reliability of an
aircraft.System
SR
and
Mission rel MR
are measures of
rel
Reliability
analysis
of
complex
engineering
problems.
The wavelet
packet (WP)
energy
extracted from
the acoustic
emission signal
was selected as
the feature to
estimate
the
tool state.
In the study,
system
availability is
considered to
be a measure of
its ability to
meet the

Exponential
distribution
for
component
failure

Weibul and log

normal distn to be
considered
in
future

State
of
Health (SoH)
is assumed
as
normal
distn

few open issues

such
as
its
experimental
validation which
is also discussed,
and reliability of
thermal
management and
cell-to-cell
interconnects in
the battery packs
A prototype tool
for implementing
the
approach
(under
development)

Exponential
distribution
for
component
failure

Kriging
prediction
follows
a
Gaussian
distribution
Normal
distriution

assumptions
ignore variations
in maintenance
practices,
load
changes
or
additions,
changing

(demand)
required
performance
level at each
mode.

Test
problem(From
(Fyffe, Hines,
and Lee 1968)

(Abouei
Ardakan
and Zeinal
Hamadani
2014)

Genetic
Algortithm

the problem is
to determine
the component
type,
redundancy
level, number
of active and
cold-standby
units for each
subsystem in
order to
maximize the
system
reliability

assumed that
the components timeto-failure
follow
a
gamma
distribution
and Erlang
time-tofailure (TTF)
distribution

environmental
conditions, circuit
alterations, etc.
and the approach
does not take into
consideration
imperfect
software
task
parallelization
and existence of
common
cause
failures in both
hardware
and
software
For the future
studies
may
focus
on
extending other
solution
methodology for
the
proposed
mixed strategy to
achieve a better
result

Table I. Summary of few case studies addressing

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