Estimate of interactive coefficients

Engineering assets are often complex systems. In a complex system, components often have failure interactions which lead to interactive failures. A system with interactive failures may lead to an increased failure probability. Hence, one has to take the interactive failures into account when designing and maintaining complex engineering systems. To address this issue, Sun et al have developed an analytical model for the interactive failures. In this model, the degree of interaction between two components is represented by interactive coefficients. To use this model for failure analysis, the related interactive coefficients must be estimated. However, the methods for estimating the interactive coefficients have not been reported. To fill this gap, this paper presents five approaches to estimating the interactive failures with focuses on probabilistic method and failure data based analysis method. Some examples have been given to demonstrate the applications of the proposed methods.