ABSTRACT
In an engineering system, multiple components may fail simultaneously due to a shared cause or Common Cause (CC). This kind of failure is referred to as a Common-Cause Failure (CCF), and it contributes greatly to the system unreliability. Due to the insufficiency of historical data and system complexities, uncertainty is an inevitable problem in system reliability analysis. This paper proposes a Valuation-Based System (VBS) method to incorporate CCFs explicitly in system reliability analysis considering parametric uncertainty (related to reliability data of components) and model uncertainty (related to the system structure). The method can model different kinds of uncertainties, have no limitation on the type of failure distributions of system components, and allow the relationship between CCs being s-independent, s-dependent or mutually exclusive.
