Probabilistic Competing Failure

This chapter addresses the probabilistic competing failure behavior, which extends the deterministic competing failure behavior by considering uncertain or probabilistic failure isolation effects. As demonstrated by the case studies from the Internet of Things applications, namely wireless sensor networks, body sensor systems, and smart homes, the probabilistic competing failure behavior abounds in systems involving relayed wireless communications. The chapter presents combinatorial methods for reliability analysis of single‐phase systems with a single type of component local failures (LFs), multiple different types of component LFs, and random propagation time. If any propagated failure with global effect originating from the probabilistic‐dependent components takes place before the occurrence of the trigger event, the whole system fails because of the global failure propagation effect. The chapter provides values of isolation factors in different groups considered for illustrating effects of the probabilistic failure isolation on the system reliability.