Binary State Reliability Computation for a Complex System Based on Extended Bernoulli Trials: Multiple Autonomous Robots

Abstract

Availability of a system is a crucial factor for planning and optimization. The concept is more challenging for modern systems such as robots and autonomous systems consisting of a complex configuration of components. In this paper, a reliability evaluation framework is developed for a system of binary state autonomous robots in an automated manufacturing environment. In this framework, the concepts in functional block diagram, table of truth, and sum of state are employed simultaneously to develop a binary state reliability model. Due to inefficacy of the method for larger number of components involved in complex systems, an extension of the Bernoulli trials is proposed. In an implementation study, the effectiveness and computational efficiency of the proposed method are illustrated. In addition, an analysis on the failure rate using the maximum likelihood estimation and confidence interval is reported. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.