IEEE Transactions on Reliability

Early Access Articles

Early Access articles are made available in advance of the final electronic or print versions. Early Access articles are peer reviewed but may not be fully edited. They are fully citable from the moment they appear in IEEE Xplore.

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Displaying Results 1 - 25 of 46
• Skew-Heavy-Tailed Degradation Models: An Application to Train Wheel Degradation

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 13
| | PDF (1174 KB)

We introduce flexible classes of linear degradation models that accommodate skewness and heavy tailed behaviors. That is achieved by assuming that the degradation or the reciprocal degradation rates have distributions in both families, the scale mixture of skew-normal and the log-scale mixture of skew-normal. We prove that the distributions for the failure time and the degradation rate belong to t... View full abstract»

• A Fortification Model for Decentralized Supply Systems and Its Solution Algorithms

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 20
| | PDF (1138 KB)

Service disruptions due to deliberate sabotage are serious threats to supply systems. To alleviate the loss of accessibility caused by such disruptions, identifying the system vulnerabilities that would be worth strengthening is a critical problem in critical infrastructure protection. Today's supply systems tend to be organized in a decentralized manner, with different components belonging... View full abstract»

• The Impact of Soft Error Event Topography on the Reliability of Computer Memories

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 14
| | PDF (964 KB)

The frequency, nature, and scope of Soft Error Events (SEEs) is becoming an increasingly significant reliability concern as transistors continuously scale down into ever smaller nanometer memory chip geometries. As part of the on-going research efforts required to address this steadily developing situation, two significant research questions were addressed by the research work presented within thi... View full abstract»

• A New Analytical Approach for Interval Availability Analysis of Markov Repairable Systems

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 11
| | PDF (605 KB)

Interval availability, defined as the fraction of time that a system is operational during a period of time $[{0,T}]$, is an important indicator of system performance, especially for industries with a Service Level Agreement, e.g., telecommunication industry, computer industry, etc. Most existing methods to compute interval availability are based on numerical simulati... View full abstract»

• Exact Confidence Limits for the Acceleration Factor Under Constant-Stress Partially Accelerated Life Tests With Type-I Censoring

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 13
| | PDF (494 KB)

In modern lifetime assessment and reliability analysis, accelerated life test has frequently been used to yield information quickly so that the life distribution of products can be estimated. This paper considers the estimate of the acceleration factor for the exponentially distributed lifetimes under the constant-stress partially accelerated life test with Type-I censored data. In many applicatio... View full abstract»

• Maintenance Optimization of Continuous State Systems Based on Performance Improvement

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 15
| | PDF (920 KB)

The continuous state system is a special kind of a system in which the states of the system and its components have continuous values, ranging from perfect functioning to complete failure. This paper introduces the performance improvement for a continuous state system, which can be used to measure the improvement of systems performance comparing pre- and postmaintenance time. The probabilistic cha... View full abstract»

• Accelerated Degradation Tests Planning With Competing Failure Modes

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 14
| | PDF (637 KB)

Accelerated degradation tests (ADT) have been widely used to assess the reliability of products with long lifetime. For many products, environmental stress not only accelerates their degradation rate but also elevates the probability of traumatic shocks. When random traumatic shocks occur during an ADT, it is possible that the degradation measurements cannot be taken afterward, which brings challe... View full abstract»

• Reliability Assessment of Hierarchical Systems With Incomplete Mixed Data

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 12
| | PDF (613 KB)

A complex engineering system typically consists of a group of components/subsystems in a hierarchical structure and the system is monitored at only some, not all, of these hierarchical levels. This paper investigates a Bayesian approach to system reliability prediction using multilevel incomplete data. These data are drawn simultaneously from different component/subsystem levels within the same sy... View full abstract»

• A State Transfer Scheduling Optimization Framework for Standby Systems

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 9
| | PDF (1075 KB)

Standby techniques of different types have been applied in a wide range of industries to improve system reliability. Since the reliabilities of the operating components are generally high in the initial period of the mission and the standby components are hardly needed, it is more reasonable to set a standby component into cold standby state at the beginning and switch it into the warm standby sta... View full abstract»

• Dynamic Defense Resource Allocation for Minimizing Unsupplied Demand in Cyber-Physical Systems Against Uncertain Attacks

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 13
| | PDF (2671 KB)

Cyber-attacks in cyber-physical systems (CPS) are receiving much attention due to the pervasive use of communication in essential services. If cyber components in CPS are compromised by attackers, the ability to maintain stability of the physical system is lost, and performance disruptions may occur. Vulnerability analysis allows quantifying the impact of attacks based on the damage cost model. Ye... View full abstract»

• A Graphical Model Based on Performance Shaping Factors for Assessing Human Reliability

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 24
| | PDF (1936 KB)

Human reliability assessment (HRA) is an aspect of risk analysis concerned with identifying, analyzing, and quantifying the causes, contributions, and occurrence of human failures. Applications of existing HRA methods are often domain-specific, and difficult to implement even for experts. Also, due to the lack of empirical data, managing uncertainty is important, if not essential. In view of such ... View full abstract»

• Void Formation and Their Effect on Reliability of Lead-Free Solder Joints on MID and PCB Substrates

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 9
| | PDF (1677 KB)

Since the introduction of lead-free solder alloys, the impact of voids in solder joints has rapidly gained in importance. Particularly in power electronics, voids in solder joints can reduce their reliability due to less heat dissipation and a significant reduction of the cross-sectional area. While void formation in the printed circuit board (PCB) technology has been the focus of many research pr... View full abstract»

• Failure Mode and Effect Analysis Using Cloud Model Theory and PROMETHEE Method

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 15
| | PDF (479 KB)

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a well-known engineering technique to recognize and reduce possible failures for quality and reliability improvement in products and services. It is a group-oriented method usually conducted by a multidisciplinary and cross-functional expert panel. In this paper, we explore two key issues inherent to the FMEA practice: the representation of diversified ri... View full abstract»

• Random Additive Signature Monitoring for Control Flow Error Detection

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 15
| | PDF (2416 KB)

Due to harsher working environments, soft errors or erroneous bit-flips occur more frequently in microcontrollers during execution. Without mitigation, such errors result in data corruption and control flow errors. Multiple software-implemented mitigation techniques have already been proposed. In this paper, we evaluate seven signature monitoring techniques in seven different test cases. We measur... View full abstract»

• Online Estimation Methods for the Gamma Degradation Process

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 7
| | PDF (298 KB)

In this paper, we provide recursion estimators in the case where a certain number of items are observed at the same time (but the time between two consecutive inspection times is not necessarily constant). This allows us to reduce the stored information. We provide sufficient conditions on the sampling scheme which ensures “good” asymptotic properties. Application to a real well-know... View full abstract»

• A Delay Time Model With Multiple Defect Types and Multiple Inspection Methods

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 12
| | PDF (539 KB)

We develop delay time models to determine optimal inspection policies for deteriorating infrastructures. We consider the case where complex infrastructures can fail due to different causes (defects) originating from various environmental or operational conditions, and capture this through modeling the arrival of different types of defects as nonhomogeneous Poisson processes with distinct rates of ... View full abstract»

• Reliability Assessment of Multiprocessor System Based on $(n,k)$-Star Network

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 11
| | PDF (384 KB)

As the size and complexity of a multiprocessor system increases, reliability evaluation becomes an important issue. The performability of a multiprocessor system heavily depends on the application program and the underlying architecture. In multitasking multiprocessor system, the problem of dynamically assigning a given dimensional subsystem to a special task is considered as a reallocation in the... View full abstract»

• Reliability Analysis of Ethernet Ring Mesh Networks

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 15
| | PDF (749 KB)

Design optimization for reliable networking is necessary for Ethernet ring mesh networks with ITU-T G.8032 Ethernet ring protection recommendation or with the IEC 62439-3 high-availability seamless redundancy protocol. To achieve this goal, the precise analysis of reliability/availability in Ethernet ring mesh consisting of single or multiple rings is one of the basic needs. Calculation of ... View full abstract»

• Reliable Control of Discrete-Time Piecewise-Affine Time-Delay Systems via Output Feedback

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 13
| | PDF (429 KB)

This paper addresses the problem of delay-dependent robust and reliable $\mathscr {H}_{\infty }$ static output feedback (SOF) control for uncertain discrete-time piecewise-affine (PWA) systems with time-delay and actuator failure in a singular system setup. The Markov chain is applied to describe the actuator faults behaviors. In particular, by utilizing a system augm... View full abstract»

• Enabling Resilience of Complex Engineered Systems Using Control Theory

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 13
| | PDF (1140 KB)

Successful recovery from a disrupted state to maintain optimal performance is a key feature that a resilient complex engineered system should have. In the engineering design community, the current focus of engineering resilience research is primarily directed toward improving overall system performance in the presence of likelihood failures. Little attention has been given to the study of how the ... View full abstract»

• Code Coverage and Postrelease Defects: A Large-Scale Study on Open Source Projects

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 16
| | PDF (677 KB)

Testing is a pivotal activity in ensuring the quality of software. Code coverage is a common metric used as a yardstick to measure the efficacy and adequacy of testing. However, does higher coverage actually lead to a decline in postrelease bugs? Do files that have higher test coverage actually have fewer bug reports? The direct relationship between code coverage and actual bug reports has not yet... View full abstract»

• Mission Abort Policy in Heterogeneous Nonrepairable 1-Out-of-N Warm Standby Systems

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 13
| | PDF (936 KB)

Many real-world critical systems, such as aircraft and human space flight systems, utilize mission aborts to enhance the survivability of the system. Specifically, the mission objectives of these systems can be aborted in cases where a certain malfunction condition is met, and a rescue or recovery procedure is then initiated for system survival. Traditional system reliability models typically cann... View full abstract»

• A Prognostic Model for Stochastic Degrading Systems With State Recovery: Application to Li-Ion Batteries

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 16
| | PDF (711 KB)

Many industrial systems inevitably suffer performance degradation. Thus, predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) for such degrading systems has attracted significant attention in the prognostics community. For some systems like batteries, one commonly encountered phenomenon is that the system performance degrades with usage and recovers in storage. However, almost all of the current prognostic ... View full abstract»

• A Comprehensive Evaluation of Software Rejuvenation Policies for Transaction Systems With Markovian Arrivals

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 21
| | PDF (2662 KB)

Software rejuvenation is one of the proactive fault management techniques to prevent system performance degradation, which may lead to the system failure caused by software aging. In the design of software rejuvenation, it is important to determine the optimal timing of triggering the rejuvenation in terms of the system overhead. In this paper, we consider six software rejuvenation policies, which... View full abstract»

• Maintenance Scheduling for Multicomponent Systems with Hidden Failures

Publication Year: 2017, Page(s):1 - 13
| | PDF (927 KB)

This paper develops a maintenance policy for a multicomponent system subject to hidden failures. Components of the system are assumed to suffer from hidden failures, which can only be detected at inspection. The objective of the maintenance policy is to determine the inspection intervals for each component such that the long-run cost rate is minimized. Due to the dependence among components, an ex... View full abstract»

Aims & Scope

IEEE Transactions on Reliability is concerned with the problems involved in attaining reliability, maintaining it through the life of the system or device, and measuring it.

Full Aims & Scope

Meet Our Editors

Editor-in-Chief
W. Eric Wong
University of Texas at Dallas
Advanced Res Ctr for Software Testing and Quality Assurance

ewong@utdallas.edu