Complex systems reliability estimation considering uncertain component lifetime distributions

This paper studies the uncertainties in component reliability estimation and their impact on system reliability prediction. Monte Carlo simulations (i.e. sampling-based methods) are used to investigate the correlation between system complexity and component lifetime distributions. We focus on the applications where component lifetimes can be modeled by Weibull distributions, but their parameters involve estimation uncertainties. Our research indicates, regardless of the component lifetime distributions, the system lifetime asymptotically approaches to the exponential distribution as the number of components in the system increases significantly.