Analysis of Interval-Valued Reliability of Multi-State System in Consideration of Epistemic Uncertainty

Since it is hard to obtain adequate performance data of high reliability component, resulting in epistemic uncertainty on component’ degradation law, system reliability cannot be accurately estimated. For the purpose of accurate estimation of system reliability, assuming the component’ performance distribution parameter is the interval parameter, a component’ performance distribution model based on interval parameter variable is built, the definition of interval continuous sequences of component’ state performance and a computational method of the interval-valued state probability are provided, the traditional universal generating function method is improved, the interval-valued universal generating function and its algorithm are defined, an assessment method of interval-valued reliability of multi-state system in consideration of epistemic uncertainty is proposed, and verification and illustration are conducted with simulation examples. This method overcomes the shortcoming that an inaccurate reliability analysis model of the component is built on account of epistemic uncertainty, which features great universality and engineering application value.