Modeling and analyzing the behavior of mechanical systems is a promising solution to achieve higher stability, reliability, availability and operability. The accurate description of the complex working principle in the mechanical system, especially the stepwise operation, is one of the crucial issues in developing a model for monitoring the state of mechanical system. This article introduces a practical method for system behavior modeling and failure analysis of the mechanism with principles of multi-operation, using high-level Petri net as the modeling language. The importance of faults and failure propagation mechanism is investigated by the state vector and the mutation vector. Case study of the proposed method contributes to validating the effectiveness of the method and provides clues for identifying weak links and evaluating reliability of the solar array system.