Chaonan Wang (UMass Dartmouth), “Reliability and Sensitivity Analysis of Complex Systems and Networks” (2014)

Chaonan Wang (UMass Dartmouth), “Reliability and Sensitivity Analysis of Complex Systems and Networks”, Prof. Liudong Xing (2014)

Reliability and sensitivity analysis are important tasks for critical system design, tuning, and maintenance activities. This dissertation work is concerned with developing and extending effective and practical algorithms for modeling and analyzing reliability and component sensitivity for complex systems and networks. Combinatorial methods were proposed to analyze reliability of single-phase and multi-phase systems subject to competing failure propagation and isolation effects. Efficient approximation methods were developed to analyze large-scale cold-standby systems with components having different types of time-to-failure distributions. This dissertation work also addressed communication reliability (CR) for wireless sensor networks (WSN). Specifically, metrics for the comparative analysis of infrastructure communication reliability (ICR) of WSN with different topologies and different data delivery models were proposed and refined. Based on the ICR analysis, component sensitivity analysis was further performed for guiding network reliability improvement activity. A phased-mission framework was also proposed for CR analysis which combines infrastructure communication and application communication. Explicit and implicit methods were proposed for the multi-phase CR analysis of WSN subject to probabilistic common-cause failures.

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