The effect of ignoring dependence between failure modes on evaluating system reliability

Assuming independence between failure modes makes system reliability calculation simple but it adds approximation error. Interestingly, error due to ignoring dependence can be negligible for a highly reliable system. This paper investigates the reasons and the factors affecting the error. Error in system probability of failure (PF) is small for high reliability when tail-dependence is not very strong or the ratio between individual PFs is large....