Effect of Common Cause Failures on Redundancy Optimization

Abstract

Redundancy allocation (RA) is one of the important approaches to improve system reliability by incorporating generally s-identical and s-independent components. However in the presence of common cause failures (CCF), a rarely studied problem as Redundancy optimization, the optimized system reliability may be adversely affected. In this paper the effect of CCF on Reliability Optimization using Redundancy Allocation has been expedited. The paper is implemented in two steps. Step1 involves obtaining the optimized solution of the problem using existing techniques. In the next step, modifications are done to compute optimized system reliability under CCF. The optimized reliability expression is modified to depict the effect of CCF. The work is extended to complex network analysis & implicit method has been used to do this work. The adverse effect of CCF on system reliability has also been demonstrated quantitatively with the help of example.