Work

Efficient Reliability Block Diagram Evaluation Through Improved Algorithms and Parallel Computing

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Quantitative reliability evaluation is essential for optimizing control policies and maintenance strategies in complex industrial systems. While Reliability Block Diagrams (RBDs) are a natural formalism for modeling these hierarchical systems, modern applications require highly efficient, online reliability assessment on resource-constrained embedded hardware. This demand presents two fundamental challenges: developing algorithmically efficient RBD evaluation methods that can handle diverse custom distributions while preserving numerical accuracy, and ensuring platform-agnostic performance across diverse multicore architectures. This paper investigates these issues by developing a new version of the librbd open-source RBD library. This version includes advances in efficiency of evaluation algorithms, as well as restructured computation sequences, cache-aware data structures to minimize memory overhead, and an adaptive parallelization framework that scales automatically from embedded processors to high-performance systems. Comprehensive validation demonstrates that these advances significantly reduce computational complexity and improve performance over the original implementation, enabling real-time analysis of substantially larger systems.

Source: Applied Sciences

DOI: 10.3390/app152111397

Authors: Gloria Gori, Marco Papini, Alessandro Fantechi

Institution: University of Florence

Language: English

Topic: Reliability and Maintenance Optimization

Subfield: Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896