Abstract:

Common cause failures exist in the real-life engineering systems widely. If the impact of common cause failures on systems is ignored and the systems reliability is analyzed with traditional methods in which  each component is independent, it will draw a too optimistic conclusion and make a wrong judgment that systems reliability meets the demand. This paper presents a complex systems oriented method of evaluating the reliability based on the integration of Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) and cellular automata (CA) in consideration of components with propagated failures having selective effect. The traditional methods have the limitation that they can only be used to solve the problems of reliability evaluation of simple systems which can be decomposed into series and parallel structures, but the proposed method is out of the limitation and with broader applications.