How combined performance and propagation of failure dependencies affect the reliability of a MSS

•Multi-state reliability evaluation with an application to wind turbines.•A state of art of dependencies that can occur in MSS was conducted.•A combination of multiple dependencies was considered in this model.

Reliability assessment of systems with multiple components is often analyzed on the assumption of component independency. This assumption can be overcome by considering component interactions and is useful for assessing the reliability of technical systems. This paper presents a reliability assessment analysis of multi-state systems (MSS) considering the combination of two types of dependencies: performance and propagation of failure. Performance dependency occurs in sub-systems sharing performance distribution, whereas propagation of failures dependence consists of failures originating in one sub-system causing failures in other sub-systems. The proposed method is based on the extended universal generating approach used for the analysis of MSS with dependencies. This method was applied to wind turbine multi-state system. The results show how sub-system interactions influence the reliability.