Efficient Reliability and Risk Analysis of Complex Interconnected Systems

This chapter introduces a quantitative approach to evaluating failure consequences by estimating the reliability of systems with cascading failures. The survival signature is highly advantageous in traditional analysis techniques, as it can be calculated once, ahead of the analysis, and used to perform reliability analysis for several scenarios on the same network without reevaluating the network structure. The chapter also introduces a novel methodology to assess cascading failures between systems. This method provides a structured approach to a quantitative analysis of failure consequences, up to an economic loss for a rigorous risk analysis of complex interconnected systems and networks. The chapter overviews the survival signature and the Monte Carlo approximation of network reliability and deals with the probabilistic characteristics of failures with dependencies. The chapter also presents some numerical examples.