A Universal Generating Function Approach for Reliability Analysis of Multi-state Systems

Reliability is one of the most critical performance measures of today´s complex systems, such as communication systems and aircraft systems. The complex systems typically have multiple partial failure states in addition to the completely working and totally failed states. Reliability analysis considering multiple possible states is known as multi-state reliability analysis. Multi-state reliability has been emphasized more and more by academia and industry. However, efficient methods were not available for some types of multi-state systems such as multi-state k-out-of-n G systems. In this paper, a new algorithm based on the universal generating function method is developed for determining the reliability of multi-state consecutive k-out-of-n G system. Example is provided to illustrate the proposed approach.