Dependability Evaluation of a Vehicle System by Simulation Method

The vehicle system studied in this paper is a type of complex repairable system in which the subsystems follow various failure distributions and conform to arbitrary failure and repair distributions. The failure data of subsystems are sometimes lacking, and the reliability test sample sizes tend to be small. Monte-Carlo technique combined with Bayes method is used to evaluate its dependability(reliability and maintainability). Following the "first-in, first-out" queuing rule, the logic relation of dependability is established by means of repairing priority and event lists. Simulation outputs the entire history of a mission, statistics of reliability and maintainability parameters and provides the basic data for system reliability design and maintainability management.