Reliability‐Based Maintenance Strategy for Complex Electromechanical Systems: A Multi‐State Network Perspective With Cascading Failure Consideration

ABSTRACT With the widespread application of complex electromechanical systems (CEMSs), reliability has become a crucial indicator of the overall performance of these systems. However, due to the multi‐state behaviour of the performance and cascading failure characteristics, it has become a significant challenge to develop a maintenance strategy that ensures the reliability of CEMS accordingly. Hence, this paper abstracts the CEMS as a multi‐layer and multi‐state network in which minimum maintenance units (MMUs) and three types of connections constitute nodes and edges in different layers. Furthermore, multi‐state models for different MMUs in the CEMS are developed based on universal generating functions (UGFs) to assess the system reliability. Thus, the effects of the operating mechanism and topological attributes can be considered in the reliability evaluation of the CEMS. Subsequently, a reliability‐based maintenance model incorporating a cascading failure model is introduced to identify optimal maintenance strategies to maintain system reliability. Finally, the CRHX high‐speed train system is used as an example to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method in developing maintenance strategies for the CEMS.