A second-order uncertainty model for calculation of the interval system reliability

A second-order uncertainty model of the system reliability is studied in the paper. This model takes into account the fact that the reliability description of the system components is unreliable itself and has some degree of belief to it. It is assumed that there is no information about probability distributions on both first and second levels of the proposed second-order uncertainty model, the available information about the reliability of the system components is heterogeneous, and there is no information about independence of the system components. Algorithms for computing beliefs to the system reliability measures and for reducing the second-order model to the first-order one are proposed. These algorithms are based on the solution of a set of linear programming problems. Numerical examples illustrate the model.