Fuzzy reliability of a marine power plant using cut set approach

In conventional reliability analysis, the failure probabilities of the components of a system are treated as exact values. It is often difficult to obtain data for failure probabilities under changing environmental conditions. Hence fuzzy sets are used to analyze fuzzy system reliability, where a fuzzy number represents reliability of each component. Kumar et al (2005) developed a new method for analyzing the fuzzy reliability of marine power plant using fault tree analysis. In this paper, a new approach has been developed for analyzing the fuzzy reliability of a marine power plant using cut set approach. The reliability of basic events are represented by trapezoidal vague sets. The results obtained by the proposed approach are compared with the existing approach and it is shown that the obtained results are better than the existing approach. The major advantage of the proposed approach (the concept of vague sets) over the existing approaches is that the proposed approach separates the positive and negative evidence for the membership of an element in a set. Reference