Showing papers in "Reliability Engineering & System Safety in 2011"

TL;DR: The paper concludes that BN is a superior technique in safety analysis because of its flexible structure, allowing it to fit a wide variety of accident scenarios.

TL;DR: The challenges involved in the representation and treatment of uncertainties in risk assessment are discussed, taking the point of view of its use in support to decision making.

TL;DR: A methodology for the estimation of the remaining useful life of components based on particle filtering that avoids making the simplifying assumptions of linearity and Gaussian noise typical of Kalman filtering, and provides a robust framework for prognosis by accounting effectively for the uncertainties associated to the estimation.

TL;DR: The HLA simulation standard is introduced and discussed in this paper as a promising approach to represent interdependencies between infrastructures and an exemplary application and some first results are presented.

TL;DR: A method is proposed to assess the probability of vessels colliding with each other, capable of determining the expected number of accidents, the locations where and the time when they are most likely to occur, while providing input for models concerned with the expected consequences.

TL;DR: A numerical algorithm is developed in this paper for the exact cost evaluation of the PHM based multi-component CBM policy, which is extended from a single unit to a multi- component system.

TL;DR: Bayesian uncertainty quantification techniques are applied to the analysis of the Spalart–Allmaras turbulence model in the context of incompressible, boundary layer flows and it is shown that by using both the model plausibility and predicted QoI, one has the opportunity to reject some model classes after calibration, before subjecting the remaining classes to additional validation challenges.

TL;DR: This work presents a surrogate-based approach to constructing surrogate models that simultaneously addresses the issues of accuracy, efficiency, and unimportant failure modes and is demonstrated to be both an efficient and accurate method for system-level reliability analysis.

TL;DR: A comparative analysis of SVM effectiveness in forecasting time-to-failure and reliability of engineered components based on time series data shows that in the analyzed cases, SVM outperforms or is comparable to other techniques.

TL;DR: This paper contains a study of a generic case where the costs are evaluated for a single wind turbine with a single component, namely with and without inclusion of periodic imperfect inspections.

TL;DR: This paper focuses on the particular case when principal components analysis is combined with analysis of variance, and generalised sensitivity indices are proposed to synthesize the influence of each parameter on the whole time series output.

TL;DR: This paper proposes to use a bivariate Birnbaum–Saunders distribution and its marginal distributions to approximate the reliability function of a product that has two dependent performance characteristics and that their degradation can be modeled by gamma processes.

TL;DR: A condition-based periodic inspection/replacement policy is developed and compared with a benchmark time-based block replacement policy, showing that it is indeed useful to follow closely the actual evolution of the system to adapt the maintenance decisions to the true system state to improve the performance of maintenance policies.

TL;DR: New algorithmic capabilities for mixed UQ are demonstrated in which the analysis procedures are more closely tailored to the requirements of aleatory and epistemic propagation and stochastic expansions for computing statistics and interval optimization for computing bounds.

TL;DR: This paper aims at presenting a method to optimize the maintenance planning for a commercial heavy vehicle that may be considered as a multi-components system, i.e. grouping maintenance operations related to each component reduces the global maintenance cost of the system.

TL;DR: The analysis showed that under normal variability conditions the ATM system was not able to close the control loops of the flight monitoring functions using feedback or feedforward strategies to achieve an adequate control of an aircraft flying in the controlled air space.

TL;DR: An extension of the RCM to reliability and risk centered maintenance (RRCM) is suggested by also considering risk as the reference for the analysis in addition to reliability.

TL;DR: This article summarises the results of four selected tests performed on the control systems for the window lift, warning light and airbag control system as well as the central gateway and discusses two selected countermeasures to address basic weaknesses exploited in these tests.

TL;DR: The approach is extended to non-parametric PDFs, wherein the entire distribution can be discretized at a finite number of points and the probability density values at these points can be inferred using the principle of maximum likelihood, thus avoiding the assumption of any particular distribution.

TL;DR: A method for assessing interdependencies of critical infrastructures, as part of a cross-sector risk and vulnerability analysis, based on a relatively simple approach applicable for practitioners but may be extended for more detailed analyses by specialists.

TL;DR: It is shown that the effective dimensions can be estimated at reasonable computational costs using variance based global sensitivity analysis and can be used for the prediction of the QMC efficiency.

TL;DR: A study of 15 QRAs shows that the factors are to some extent included, and there are large differences between the QRAs.

TL;DR: An application of functional resonance accident models (FRAM) for the safety analysis of complex socio-technological systems, i.e. systems which include not only technological, but also human and organizational components, is presented.

TL;DR: It is argued that the guide fails in several ways in producing consistent and meaningful definitions of many of the key concepts covered, including probability, vulnerability, hazard, risk identification and risk description.

TL;DR: This paper studies the effect of the shape parameter on the failure rate and three variables of importance in the context of maintenance and reliability improvement and proposes a classification scheme for the distribution based on theshape parameter.

TL;DR: A structured Formal Vulnerability Assessment (FVA) methodology is presented, seeking to transfer the safety-oriented Formal Safety Assessment framework into the domain of maritime supply chain vulnerability, to cope with low-frequency high-impact disruptive scenarios that were not necessarily foreseen.

TL;DR: A probabilistic computational framework for the Pareto optimization of the preventive maintenance applications to bridges of a highway transportation network and the final result is the Paredto front of optimal solutions among which the managers should chose, depending on engineering and economical factors.

TL;DR: This work investigates the effect of the analysis procedure, the number of seismic records imposed, the performance criterion used and the structural type (regular or irregular) is investigated, on the life-cycle cost analysis of 3D reinforced concrete structures.

TL;DR: Efficient algorithms based on continuous optimization to find the bounds on second and higher moments of interval data and bounding envelopes for the family of Johnson distributions are presented, analogous to the notion of empirical p-box in the literature.

TL;DR: The Cox regression model and its extension in the presence of time-dependent covariates for determining maintainability is developed and a simple case study is used to demonstrate how the model can be applied in a real case.