11.3 Serial System Reliabilty

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Fault Coverage is the probability that a system will recover from a failure. This can be derived approximately by examining the design, and making reliable estimates. This number will be difficult to determine exactly because it is based on real, and often unpredictable phenomenon.

Reliability can be determined with individual system components as a function of probabilities. The two main categories of systems are series, and parallel (redundant). In the best case a high reliability system would have many parallel systems in series.

In terms of design, a system designer must have an intuitive understanding of the concept of series/parallel functions.

We can consider a series system where if any of the units fails, then the system becomes inoperative. Here the reliabilities of each of the system components is chained (ANDed) together.