Reliability analysis for systems with outsourced components

"The current business model for many industrial firms is to function as system integrators, depending on numerous outsourced components from outside component suppliers. This practice has resulted in tremendous cost savings; it makes system reliability analysis, however, more challenging due to the limited component information available to system designers. The component information is often proprietary to component suppliers. Motivated by the need of system reliability prediction with outsourced components, this work aims to explore feasible ways to accurately predict the system reliability during the system design stage. Four methods are proposed. The first method reconstructs component reliability functions using limited reliability data with respect to component loads, and the system reliability is then estimated statistically. The second method applies two-class support vector machines (SVM) to approximate limit-state functions of outsourced components based on the categorical reliability dataset. With the integration of the obtained limit-state functions and those of in-house components, the joint probability density function of all the components is estimated, thereby leading to accurate system reliability prediction. The third method is an extension of the second one, and a one-class SVM is proposed to rebuild limit-state functions for outsourced components given only the failure dataset. The last method deals with the case where no reliability dataset is available. A partial safety factor method is developed, which enables component suppliers to provide sufficient information to system designers for accurate reliability analysis without revealing the proprietary design details. Both numerical examples and engineering applications demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed methods"--Abstract, page iv.