A BDD-based algorithm for reliability analysis of phased-mission systems

This paper presents a new algorithm (PMS-BDD) based on the binary decision diagram (BDD) for reliability analysis of phased-mission systems (PMS). PMS-BDD uses phase algebra to deal with the dependence across the phases, and a new BDD operation to incorporate the phase algebra. Due to the nature of the BDD, cancellation of common components among the phases can be combined with the BDD generation, without additional operations; and the sum of disjoint products (SDP) can be implicitly represented by the final BDD. Several examples and experiments show that PMS-BDD is more efficient than the algorithm based on SDP, in both computation time and storage space; this efficiency allows the study of some practical, large phased-mission systems