To conduct a reliability analysis for mechanical components, it is necessary to consider the combined influence of strength deterioration and dynamic loads. An efficient method based on subset simulation is proposed in this paper to analyze time-variant reliability by considering the strength deterioration of mechanical components in a continuous system. A gamma process is used to describe the deterioration of system strength. A model for timevariant reliability considering strength deterioration is constructed for a continuous system. A representative example and tubular cantilever structure are assessed to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. The reliability probability examples were analyzed using a first-order reliability method and benchmark results for the proposed method were derived using direct Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). The results of the proposed method and MCS are consistent, indicating that the proposed method is an effective reliability analysis method for evaluating small failure probabilities in a continuous system subjected to strength deterioration and dynamic loads.
Complex systems contain a large number of components, and in some cases, failure of one or more of these components can cause the entire system to fail. Replacing failed components with other functioning components properly in the original system can be an attractive way for improving system reliability. This paper proposes a new system reliability optimization model to achieve optimal component reliability and the ideal component-swapping strategy under a certain set of constraints. Furthermore, the survival signature is introduced to more efficient calculation of system reliability under various component-swapping cases, and an artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm with local search method for component swapping is applied to solve the optimization problem. Finally, numerical examples are presented to illustrate the optimization process.
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