Reliability assessment of multi-state performance sharing systems with transmission loss and random shocks

In this article, a performance sharing system with transmission loss and a shock operation environment is studied. Such systems are widely found in power distribution systems, distributed computing systems, data transmission systems, communication systems, and so on. The system consists of n components and each of them works to satisfy its demand and shares its performance surplus with others through a common bus. When the system operates, it may suffer a variety of stresses from its operating environment, which can be regarded as random external shocks, and the transmission loss is also wildly seen in engineering systems. Therefore, the random shocks and transmission loss are considered in this article. The performance level of a component is affected by three types of random external shocks–invalid shocks, valid shocks and extreme shocks. The system fails if at least one component cannot satisfy its demand. A finite Markov chain imbedding approach and phase-type distributions are used to estimate the performance level for each component and the universal generating function technique is applied to analyze system reliability. Analysis of a power distribution system is given to show the application of the model under study and the effectiveness of the proposed method.