QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY ASSESSMENT OF MULTI-RESPONSE DEGRADING SYSTEMS

Abstract

This paper presents a non-sampling based method for the simultaneous evaluation of quality and performance reliability of engineering systems with multiple time-variant responses due to multiple degrading components. This work provides a platform for robust design of degrading systems. The system performance degradations are related to component degradations using mechanistic models. The system soft failure is defined as the non-conformance of any response with respect to critical levels and such relations are easily modeled as time dependent limit-state functions. Then, for discrete time it is shown that an incremental failure set that emerges from a safe region can be written using only a pair of successive system instantaneous failure sets. The cumulative distribution function of soft failure is built by summing the incremental failure probabilities. A practical implementation of the proposed method can be manifest by first-order reliability methods (FORM) and second-order bounds. The proposed method can be used to assess initial quality and performance reliability of systems with combinations of designated means and tolerances. Examples of electro mechanical systems show the details of the formulation and the potential of the approach. Error sources and their magnitudes are discussed.