Reliability Evaluation and Optimization for Phased Mission Systems with Cascading Effects

Abstract The phased mission system (PMS) has been widely used in aerospace, data transmission, internet of things, which perform the entire mission with non-overlapping, consecutive and multiple phases of operation. The challenge for the PMS reliability evaluation is to consider both the dynamic of each component across phases and the functional dependence (FDEP) among components. In some cases, the component can fail individually or resulting from the cascading effect (CE) caused by internal FDEP among components. So, this paper presents the reliability evaluation method for PMSs with the CE based on recursive algorithm. Then, to find the best components’ allocation scheme with the maximized system reliability and the minimized manufacturing cost, the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is employed to solve the combinatorial optimization problem. Finally, the numerical example illustrates the effectiveness of proposed method and obtains solutions of the optimization model.