A New Real-Time Reliability Prediction Method for Dynamic Systems Based on On-Line Fault Prediction

While a specific system is in use, its reliability will decrease gradually after the infant mortality period because of the components' degradation, or external attacks. Thus, reliability is a natural characteristic of a system's health, and can be used for condition monitoring & predictive maintenance. This paper introduces a new real-time reliability prediction method for dynamic systems which incorporates an on-line fault prediction algorithm. The factors that may reduce a system's reliability are modeled as an additive fault input to the system, and the fault is assumed to be varying linearly with time, approximately. The time-varying fault is roughly estimated based on a modified particle filtering algorithm at first. Then, as a time series, the fault estimate sequence is smoothed, and predicted by an exponential smoothing method. Mathematical analysis shows that the effects of the system, and measurement noises on the fault estimates are greatly reduced by exponential smoothing, which indicates that the comparatively high accuracy of the fault estimates & predictions is guaranteed. Based on the particle filtering & fault prediction results, the whole system's predictive reliability is computed through a Monte Carlo simulation strategy. The effectiveness of the proposed real-time reliability prediction method is validated by a computer simulation of a three-vessel water tank system.