Analysis of generalized phased-mission system reliability, performance, and sensitivity

This paper proposes a generalized phased-mission system (GPMS) analysis methodology called GPMS-CPR that has high computation efficiency and is easy to implement. GPMS-CPR can evaluate a wider range of more practical systems with less restrictive mission requirements, while offering more human-friendly performance indices such as multilevel grading as compared to the previous PMS approaches. GPMS-CPR also accounts for imperfect coverage. This method implements an exciting synthesis of several approaches into a single methodology. Further, it extends the methodology to allow for the analysis of sensitivity of each component for each phase as well as for the entire phased mission, with respect to the multilevel reliability for the GPMS. The conventional phase-OR PMS appear as a special case this GPMS. The advantages of this approach are in the low computational complexity, broad applicability, easy implementation, and high integration (reliability, performance, and sensitivity for GPMS). The methodology is illustrated with examples.