Simplified Markov Model for Reliability Analysis of Phased-Mission System Using States Merging Method

This paper presents a simplified Markov model to evaluate the reliability of phased-mission system (PMS). The time cost and storage requirement are very huge for traditional Markov model to analyze the PMS reliability as the number of components increases to a large scale. The states merging method proposed in this paper can account for the PMS with subsystems consisting of identical components, and similar PMSs are common in real-world systems. The simplified Markov model by states merging has smaller number of system states, compared with the traditional one. Furthermore, for the above subsystems, the size of our model increases only linearly as the number of components increases, while the size of the traditional model exponentially increases. Finally, the effectiveness and correctness of our approach are analyzed by comparing with the traditional Markov method.