Abstract:

The failure propagation in dynamic systems is driven by discrete component fault events, continuous processes as well as their interactions. This hybrid feature of the fault propagation brings about the difficulty in fault cognition and modeling. Existing researches regard faults just as discrete events. Thus they only focus on analyzing how the discrete system failures are caused by random component failures. However, the continuous processes in fault propagation have always been ignored for the sake of simplifications in engineering, which leads to the inaccuracy of the description of dynamic system failures. This paper defines the hybrid failure propagation within two dimensions for the dynamic system,and analyzes its hybrid factors and propagation features. For accurate description of these hybrid features, a hybrid failure propagation modeling method is proposed based on the hybrid theory which is used to model the interaction of discrete events and continuous processes. The proposed method is applied to a temperature control system. The simulation results show the hybrid feature of the failure propagation, as well as the feasibility of the presented modeling method.