Online probabilistic assessment of operating safety for multi-mode engineering systems based on Bayesian methods

Operating safety has become more and more important in today´s engineering systems, since the systems become more and more complex. And it is crucial to develop strategies for online operating safety assessment. Although there have been some studies and researches on operating safety assessment, online assessment has not yet been paid sufficient attention, especially for multi-mode engineering systems. This paper proposes a probabilistic framework of online operating safety assessment for multi-mode engineering systems. First, a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used to characterize multiple operating modes. Then, based on a kind of definition of safety index (SI), the SI for one single mode is calculated. A Bayesian method is then presented to calculate the posterior probabilities belonging to each operating mode with consideration of sample dependency.