Reliability evaluation of non-repairable systems with failure mechanism trigger effect

Abstract Trigger effect indicates that some events occur because of the trigger of other events. This kind of effect often appears in the operation of products and leads to failure. Due to the randomness of trigger events, it is difficult to predict the reliability of a product that embraces triggering processes. In this paper, we develop a new reliability model for non-repairable systems with the trigger effect. The effect is divided into two types: degradation-degradation trigger effect and degradation-overstress trigger effect. To model this effect, the degradation process is described by the continuous or discrete stochastic process, while the overstress process is described by the homogeneous Poisson process. Furthermore, a method integrating Petri Net and Monte Carlo is proposed to evaluate the complex system reliability. To demonstrate the proposed model, a conductive slip ring in an electromechanical orientation device is introduced as a case, where the trigger effect of one trigger mechanism and three dependent basic mechanisms are considered. It is shown that the trigger time model and system modeling method can describe the trigger failure behaviors and evaluate the reliability of complex systems with the trigger effect.