On-line reliability assessment for an electronic system subject to condition monitoring

We present a new approach for the on-line reliability assessment of an electronic system subject to condition monitoring. In this paper, the degradation of the electronic system is driven by a nonlinear Wiener process with a time drift, which is incorporated into the proportional hazards model to describe the hazard rate of the time to failure. Using the discretization of the degradation path and the time axis, closed-form approximations for the reliability quantities are obtained using the transition probability matrix. Unlike the conventional method which is applicable only for a small number of degradation states, the calculation of these quantities can be accomplished with just the basic manipulation of the transition matrix, which is computationally efficient and applicable to real-time conditional reliability calculation for a general number of states. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by a numerical study.