Pivotal Decomposition to Find Availability and Failure-Frequency of Systems with Common-Cause Failures

The purpose of this article is to extend the pivotal decomposition method for system availability and failure frequency from the case where components are statistically independent to that where components are also subject to common-cause failures. This method requires as input data the failure rate and the mean repair time of each component, the occurrence rate of each common-cause failure, and the mean-time for repairing it.