A separable ternary decision diagram based analysis of generalized phased-mission reliability

This paper considers the reliability analysis of a generalized phased-mission system (GPMS) with two-level modular imperfect coverage. Due to the dynamic behavior & the statistical dependencies, generalized phased-mission systems offer big challenges in reliability modeling & analysis. A new family of decision diagrams called ternary decision diagrams (TDD) is proposed for use in the resulting separable approach to the GPMS reliability evaluation. Compared with existing methods, the accuracy of our solution increases due to the consideration of modular imperfect coverage; the computational complexity decreases due to the nature of the TDD, and the separation of mission imperfect coverage from the solution combinatorics. In this paper, the TDD-based separable approach is presented, and compared with existing methods for analyzing the GPMS reliability. An example generalized phased-mission system is analyzed to illustrate the advantages of our approach.