Dependent failure behavior modeling for risk and reliability: A systematic and critical literature review

Zhiguo Zeng (1, 2) , Anne Barros , David Coit

1 LGI - Laboratoire Génie Industriel
2 CentraleSupélec

This paper presents a systematic and critical literature review on dependent failure behavior modeling in risk and reliability. A literature search is conducted systematically based on pre-defined protocols. The resulting papers are first analyzed through a meta-data and bibliometric analysis, in which the trend of publication growth, important publication sources and authors, collaboration among the authors are identified. The evolution of research topics in three time periods (prior to mid-$1990$s, mid-$1990$s - $2010$ and $2010$ - present) is also discussed through a semantic clustering: Early research (prior to mid-$1990$s) mainly came from nuclear risk assessment or statistical modeling. Due to the limitation of computational power, the models in this period are limited to small-scale and simplified systems. More computationally-demanding models, \emph{e.g.,} copula, frailty, dynamic fault trees and Bayesian network, emerged since mid-$1990$s. Another important research topic that appeared since mid-$1990$s is maintenance optimization considering dependencies. More recent research trends (since $2010$) include the dependent failure models considering degradation processes and random shocks, and large-scale, complex engineering systems like critical infrastructure and cyber-physical~systems. Then, the most important papers from the literature search are chosen for a content analysis and critical review. The main results of the critical literature review include: First, we summarize the dependent failure behavior in different system hierarchies, \emph{i.e.,} failure mechanism level, component level, system level and systems-of-systems level. In each level, the main dependent failure behavior from literature is discussed with examples. Second, we develop a classification framework for the dependent failure behavior models. Depending on whether the dependency mechanism is explicitly considered, we broadly classified the existing models into statistical dependency models and mechanistic dependency models. Statistical dependency models do not explicitly consider the dependency mechanisms but model them in terms of statistical association among the variables, and can be further divided into lifetime distribution models, system state models and degradation process models. Mechanistic dependency models consider the dependency mechanisms explicitly, and can be further divided into failure interaction models and failure propagation models. The most frequently-used models in each category are critically reviewed, based on which we identify five challenging problems the current dependency models face, give our perspectives on their possible solutions, and discuss future research~opportunities.

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Zhiguo Zeng, Anne Barros, David Coit. Dependent failure behavior modeling for risk and reliability: A systematic and critical literature review. Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2023, 239, pp.109515. ⟨10.1016/j.ress.2023.109515⟩. ⟨hal-04152669⟩