Towards the formal performance analysis of multistate coherent systems using HOL theorem proving

Abstract

Many practical engineering systems and their components have multiple performance levels and failure modes. If these systems form a monotonically increasing structure function (system model) with respect to the performance of their components and also if all of their components affect the overall system performance, then they are said to be multistate coherent systems. Traditionally, the reliability analysis of these multistate coherent systems has been carried out using paper-and-pencil or simulation based methods. The former method is often prone to human errors, while the latter requires high computational resources for large and complex systems having components with multiple operational states. As a complimentary approach, we propose to use Higher-order-logic (HOL) theorem proving to develop a sound reasoning framework to analyze the reliability of multistate coherent systems in this paper. This framework allows us to formally verify generic mathematical properties about multistate coherent systems with an arbitrary number of components and their states. Particularly, we present the HOL formalization of series and parallel multistate coherent systems and formally verify their deterministic and probabilistic properties using the HOL4 theorem prover. For illustration purposes, we present the formal reliability analysis of the multistate oil and gas pipeline to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.