Degradation and Failure Mechanisms of Complex Systems: Principles
This work addresses the need for better reliability modeling in complex systems, but it is incremental as it primarily reviews and categorizes existing failure mechanisms without introducing new methods or data.
The study tackles the problem of understanding degradation and failure mechanisms in cyber-physical-human complex systems by classifying and discussing hardware, human, software, and interaction-related failures, which aids in developing conceptual risk and reliability models.
A cyber physical human complex system failure prevents the accomplishment of the systems intended function. The failure of a complex system could be a breakdown of any system hardware, human related factors, application software, or the interaction between these components. Having knowledge about all these three components would allow us to better understand the behavior, interactions, and the associated failure mechanisms of the cyber physical human systems as a whole. In this study, degradation mechanisms in these three components are classified and discussed. The main categories are hardware related degradation mechanisms including mechanical, thermal, chemical, electronic and radiation effects degradation mechanisms. In addition to hardware related degradation mechanisms, human failure modes, software errors, and the failures due to cyber physical human interactions are presented and discussed. This paper covers the main types of failure mechanisms in complex systems and is beneficial for developing conceptual risk and reliability models for complex systems.