Reliability Analysis of Phased Mission Systems Using GO-FLOW Methodology

Abstract A Phased Mission System (PMS) is defined as a system subject to multiple, consecutive and non-overlapping operation phases of tasks during its mission, which is commonly found in complex technological and engineering practices such as aerospace, nuclear and military operations, etc. Over the past few decades, extensive efforts have been devoted to advance the theories, methods, techniques and tools used for reliability analysis of PMS. The general methods include fault tree based combinatorial approaches and Markov chains. In this paper, a success-oriented GO-FLOW method with a new exact algorithm is presented for reliability analysis of multi-phase mission systems. The feasibility and correctness of the extended GO-FLOW method (GFA) for PMS analysis are proved by comparing the results with fault tree analysis based on Sum of Disjoint Products (SDP) generation algorithm for two example case studies. The comparison results show that the GO-FLOW method can be effectively applied for reliability analysis of PMS in a very compact way. Consistent results can be obtained using extended GO-FLOW algorithm when compared to the fault tree analysis.