Confidence Bounds and Propagation of Uncertainties in System Availability and Reliability Computations.

Abstract

This paper develops bounds on the uncertainties in system availabilities or reliabilities which have been computed from structural (series, parallel, etc.) relations among uncertain subsystem availabilities or reliabilities. It is assumed that the highly available (reliable) subsystems have been tested or simulated to determine their unavailabilities (unreliabilities) to within some small percentages of uncertainty. It is shown that series, parallel and r out of n structures which are nominally highly available will have unavailability uncertainties whose percentage errors are of the same order as the subsystem uncertainties. Thus overall system analysis errors, even for large systems, are of the same order of magnitude as the uncertainties in the component probabilities. Both systematic (bias type) uncertainties and independent random uncertainties are considered.

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 01, 1975
Accession Number
ADA010198

Entities

People

  • Leonard Shaw
  • Martin L. Shooman

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Availability
  • Computations
  • Probability
  • Reliability
  • Uncertainty

Readers

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