Reliability analysis for multi-component systems with degradation interaction and categorized shocks

In engineering applications, system degradation is influenced by continuous degradation and random shocks simultaneously. In this paper, we study the reliability of a multi-component system with interacting components that are subject to both continuous degradation process and categorized shocks. By interacting components, we refer to the case where the degradation behavior of a particular component can influence that of another component. This is in contrast to previous works in the literature that typically assume independence in the degradation interaction in multi-component systems. Moreover, categorized shocks are assumed to selectively affect one or more components by either causing a sudden jump in the degradation level or accelerating the degradation rate, or both. Under these assumptions, we derive the reliability of a series system in a recursive way and propose a simulation method to approximate the failure time of k-out-of-n systems. An example of the MEMS (Micro-electro mechanical systems) oscillator, which is a typical system with interacting components subject to continuous degradation and categorized random shocks, is studied in the end to demonstrate the results obtained in this paper.