Statistical Taylor series expansion: An approach for epistemic uncertainty propagation in Markov reliability models

In this paper we develop a new Taylor series expansion method for computing model output metrics under epistemic uncertainty in the model input parameters. Specifically, we compute the expected value and the variance of the stationary distribution associated with Markov reliability models. In the multi-parameter case, our approach allows to analyze the impact of correlation between the uncertainty on the individual parameters the model output metric. In addition, we also approximate true risk by using the Chebyshev’ inequality. Numerical results are presented and compared to the corresponding Monte Carlo simulations ones