Reliability and Safety Analysis of Safety Critical Systems with Cascading Failures  
Author Meiyu Tian

 
Co-Author(s) Xujie Jia; Xueying Song

 
Abstract Cascading failure is a phenomenon that minor disturbances trigger a chain reaction failure of the system, causing the disaster to quickly spread in the system and causing part or all of the system to collapse. Extending the failure states of cascaded systems from the general two-state to multi-state, namely, hazardous failure, safe failure, and normal operation, the current paper introduce loading-dependent model of cascading failure of a system with many identical components randomly loaded. The reliability of cascading failure systems was analyzed by considering the number of remaining non-hazardous failure components, the influence degree of hazardous failure parts. Meanwhile, considering the high probability of failure of all components in the highly stressed system, we generalized the parameters to the saturation function and derived the failure rate of individual components separately. The corresponding system reliability indices are developed including system reliability, distributions of total number of failures, distributions of cascading failure propagation generations, and other related probabilities. This study provides a useful reference for improving the system reliability by adjusting the load distribution method in a practical environment.

 
Keywords cascading failure, load distribution, multi-state failure, saturation function, system reliability
   
    Article #:  RQD28-120
 

Proceedings of 28th ISSAT International Conference on Reliability & Quality in Design
August 3-5, 2023