Determination of Reliability Using Event-Based Monte Carlo Simulation

The reliability of a system can be found analytically, given the time-to-failure distribution for each element and the system configuration. Such analysis becomes increasingly difficult as the complexity of a system increases. This paper presents a Monte Carlo simulation procedure to estimate the reliability of a complex system with relative ease. A computer program, written in FORTRAN IV G Level code for an IBM 360/65 computer, finds all minimal tie-sets from the system configuration, which is provided as a coded reliability flow graph. Each replication in the simulation involves a search through the minimal tie-sets to identify the success or failure of the system for each value of the required time of satisfactory performance. The reliability of the system is then estimated as a tabulated function of time.