Reliability analysis for a multi-unit system with failure rate interaction

Reliability analysis is one of the important foundations in engineering to optimize system performance. A multi-unit system with one dominant unit and numerous secondary units is proposed through practical problems, in which, the secondary units form a m-out-of-n voting system, with load-sharing units and time-varying failure. Furthermore, the type-I failure interaction exists between the dominant and secondary units. By researching on the system, failure rate function of dominant unit is derived. Using the properties of Markov process, a first-order linear differential equations is established, then, the transient availability and reliability of the system can be solved.