A Bayesian Networks Based Method for Ship Reliability Assessment

Reliability assessment is a key step to reveal whether ships feature an acceptable level of reliability. Ships are typical dynamic systems, and their reliability cannot be evaluated using the static logic based methods, such as the analytic method, multilevel synthesis method and numerical simulation method. Fully considering the characteristics of ships, we proposed a new reliability assessment method based on dynamic Bayesian networks and numerical simulation. The proposed method overcomes the limitations of the analytic method and multilevel synthesis method, as well as provides an effective means for the reliability assessment of ships. The proposed method is also suitable for the reliability assessment of other complex dynamic systems.