Abstract: | The performance and state of multi-state system depend on its structure and different state combinations of the components. In order to evaluate the reliability of multi-state system effectively,a reliability evaluation and sensitivity analysis method based on the time degradation measures was proposed. The equivalence sets of the multi-state system under different output performances were established. The state combinations were classified according to the performance level. The degradation probability models under different states were established,and the new reliability measures,such as dynamic probability of multi-state system,holding time in each state,dynamic expectation function and integrated expectation function of the performance,were proposed and used to implement the dynamic reliability evaluation and sensitivity analysis. A certain diesel engine fuel feeding system was taken as an application example to illustrate the proposed method. The results show that not only the holding time in the desired state of the components and the system can be predicted,but also the best state component in a certain time period can be obtained. |