Fuzzy reliability-redundancy allocation problem of the overspeed protection system

System reliability is defined as the probability of satisfactory performance of a system under stated conditions for a specified period of time. According to this definition, four parameters, including probability, satisfactory performance, specific conditions, and time should be exactly characterized to evaluate the system reliability accurately. However, due to the uncertainty involved in real situations, it is hardly possible to assess the aforementioned parameters precisely. In this article, two general and distinct approaches, including Zadeh's extension principle and modification of fuzzy parametric programming (FPP), are proposed to take into account such uncertainty in a famous reliability problem called the overspeed protection system. According to Zadeh's extension principle, a pair of nonlinear programming problems is formulated to compute..-level cuts of fuzzy system reliability. Themembership function of fuzzy system reliability can then be constructed analytically by numerating different values of... This fuzzy system reliability presents flexibility for further system analysis. In the second approach, from a different point of view, a variant of FPP is improved that provides a crisp value as a system reliability measure. The rewarding point of the latter procedure is to handle the problem in a computationally easier way.