Examining Coincident Failures and Usage Profiles in Reliability Analysis of an Embedded Vehicle Sub-System

Structured models of systems allow us to determine their reliability, yet there are numerous challenges that need to be overcome to obtain meaningful results. This paper reports the results and approach used to model and analyze the Anti-lock Braking System of a passenger vehicle using Stochastic Petri Nets. Special emphasis is laid on modeling extra-functional characteristics like coincident failures among components, severity of failure and usage-profiles of the system. Components generally interact with each other during operation, and a faulty component can affect the probability of failure of other components. The severity of a failure also has an impact on the operation of the system, as does the usage profile failures which occur during active use of the system are the only failures considered (i.e., in reliability calculations).