Reliability of Multi-State Systems subject to competing failures

This paper identifies and addresses an issue of competing propagated failures and failure isolation effect caused by functional dependence for Multi-State Systems (MSS). An analytical combinatorial method is proposed for incorporating the competing failure processes in the reliability analysis of MSS. The proposed method can evaluate the reliability of MSS with arbitrary distributions of the system component states. The method is also applicable to MSS with any type of system structure (i.e., not limited to series, parallel, or series parallel structure). An example multi-state memory system is analyzed to demonstrate the application and advantages of the proposed method.