Abstract
Many practical systems need to fulfill their mission in multiple phases, where the system in different phases may have to perform different tasks undergoing different environmental conditions and success criteria. In the last few decades, reliability modeling and evaluation of phased mission systems (PMSs) and related optimization problems have attracted a lot of attention. This chapter is dedicated to a comprehensive review of recent developments on reliability evaluation and optimization of PMSs. Different evaluation methods are classified and their applicability to different types of PMSs (e.g., static versus dynamic; redundant versus non-redundant; perfect coverage versus imperfect coverage) are discussed. Traditional and recently-developed optimization problems related to PMSs are introduced. Some directions for future researches are suggested.