DescriptionThe concept of the system signature has quickly become a popular tool for analysis and assessment of system reliability. A good introduction and overview to the topic is provided by Samaniego's excellent book `System Signatures and their Applications in Engineering Reliability' (Springer, 2007). However, signatures can only really be used for systems with a single type of component, as all the lifetimes of the components must be exchangeable random quantities. Hence, while this work is of theoretic interest, its practical value for real systems is limited, as these tend to have components of multiple types. Also, reliability analysis for networks can typically not be based on the signature, as networks tend to have at least two different kinds of components (`nodes' and `links').To overcome this major drawback of the system signature, we have presented an alternative, called the `Survival Signature'. For systems with a single type of component this is directly related to the signature, hence comes with the same opportunities and advantages. Crucially, the survival signature is straightforwardly generalized, as introduced, to systems with multiple types of components. This project provides the opportunity to study the signature, and the survival signature, in detail, and to consider its application for assessment of system reliability, with related aspects such as statistical inference (e.g. to predict future reliability of a system) and decision support (e.g. how to design a system). As theory of survival signatures has only recently been developed, there are many interesting challenges to which you can make a novel contribution, these range from purely theoretical to aspects of application.
PrerequisitesYou should at least have done either Probability II or Statistical Concepts II, ideally both. Furthermore, I would expect this topic to be particularly interesting to students who take modules on Statistics, Probability, Decision Theory and Operations Research in year III.ReferencesPlease see the webpage on Survival Signatures for System Reliability for more information, including several research papers on this topic.Please feel free to contact me! |
email: Frank Coolen