A New Metric for Time-Dependent Mechanism Reliability Analysis

Abstract

In classical time-dependent mechanism reliability analysis, probability or fuzzy reliability theory is employed. However, the method based on probability theory requires probability distributions of all the uncertain parameters, but the accurate distributions of parameters in real life are sometimes difficult to obtain. Moreover, fuzzy theory fails to describe many subjective random variables due to the duality of randomness. In this paper, we utilize uncertain variables to uniformly represent the subjective random and epistemic uncertainties by quoting the uncertainty theory.