Abstract
Many practical systems are phased-mission systems with multimode failures (MFPMSs) where the mission consists of multiple nonoverlapping phases of operation, and the system components may assume more than one failure mode. In MFPMSs, dependence arises among different phases and among different failure modes of the same component, which makes the reliability analysis of MFPMSs difficult. This paper proposes a new analytical method based on multivalued decision diagrams (MDDs) for the reliability analysis of nonrepairable MFPMSs. MDDs have recently been applied to the reliability analysis of single-phase systems with multiple component states. In this paper, we make the new contribution by proposing a novel way to adapt MDDs for the reliability analysis of systems with multiple phases and multimode failures. Examples show how the MDD models are generated and evaluated to obtain the mission reliability measures. Performance of the MDD-based method is compared with an existing binary decision diagram (BDD)-based method for MFPMS analysis through several examples and a comprehensive benchmark study. Empirical results show that the proposed MDD-based method can offer lower computational complexity and simpler model construction and evaluation algorithms than the BDD-based method, and it can be effectively applied to large practical cases.