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Managing failure dependence of complex systems with hybrid uncertainty is one of the hot problems in reliability assessment. Epistemic uncertainty is attributed to complex working environment, system structure, human factors, imperfect knowledge, etc. Probability‐box has powerful characteristics for uncertainty analysis and can be effectively adopted to represent epistemic uncertainty. However, arithmetic rules on probability‐box structures are mostly used among structures representing independent random variables. In most practical engineering applications, failure dependence is always introduced in system reliability analysis. Therefore, this paper proposes a developed Bayesian network combining copula method with probability‐box for system reliability assessment. There are four main steps involved in the reliability computation process: marginal distribution identification and estimation, copula function selection and parameter estimation, reliability analysis of components with correlations and Bayesian forward analysis. The benefits derived from the proposed approach are used to overcome the computational limitations of n‐dimensional integral operation, and the advantages of useful properties of copula function in reliability analysis of systems with correlations are adopted. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed Bayesian network, the proposed method is applied to a real large piston compressor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the Tobit Kalman filtering problem for a class of discrete time-varying systems subject to censored observations, integral measurements and probabilistic sensor failures under the Round-Robin protocol (RRP). The censored observations are characterized by the Tobit observation model, the integral measurements are described as functions of system states over a certain time interval required for data acquisition, and the sensor failures are governed by a set of uncorrelated random variables. The RRP is employed to decide the transmission sequence of sensors in order to alleviate undesirable data collisions. By resorting to the augmentation technique and the orthogonality projection principle, a protocol-based Tobit Kalman filter (TKF) is developed with the coexistence of integral measurements and sensor failures that lead to a couple of augmentation-induced terms. Moreover, the performance of the proposed filter is analyzed through examining the statistical property of the error covariance of the state estimation. Further analysis shows the existence of self-propagating upper and lower bounds on the estimation error covariance. A case study on ballistic roll rate estimation is presented to illustrate the efficacy of the developed filter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ionospheric heights provided by ionosondes are vital for over-the-horizon radar (OTHR) target tracking. However, biases contained in the provided ionospheric heights definitely cause degradation of the tracking performance. This paper is concerned with the joint estimation problem of the target state and the ionospheric height bias for OTHR target tracking subject to multipath and cluttered measurements. A Markovian jump ionospheric height bias model is presented by simultaneously considering the intermittent and abrupt ionosphere changes. Meanwhile, a set of stochastic variables are adopted to depict association uncertainties among measurements, clutters, and propagation modes so that association is embedded in the resultant measurement model with random coefficients. Through such modeling transformation from association uncertainties to parameter randomness, the coupling processing of data association and state estimate is equivalent to pure state estimate subject to stochastic parameters. Furthermore, an optimal linear joint estimator containing causality constraints is developed in the minimum mean-squared error sense, and further extended to the case of nonlinear measurement model via iterative optimization. A target tracking example with four resolvable propagation modes illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed estimation scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Hybrid uncertainty is represented by probability-box and dempster-shafer Structure. • A dependency bounds analysis method is proposed for non-deterministic dependency problem. • Hybrid uncertainty and non-deterministic dependency are integrated and propagated in bayesian network. • A comparison of the proposed method with the frechet inequalities method and 2-stage monte carlo method is performed. • High narrowing rates during execution time are obtained by the proposed method. In reliability assessment, a difficulty is to handle a complex system with hybrid uncertainty (aleatory and epistemic uncertainty) and dependency problem. Probability-box is a general model to represent hybrid uncertainty. Arithmetic rules on the structure are mostly used between independent random variables. However, in practice, dependency problems are also common in reliability assessment. In addition, in most real applications, there is some prior information on the dependency of components, but the available information may be not enough to determine dependent parameters. The issue is named non-deterministic dependency problem in the paper. Affine arithmetic is hence used to produce dependent interval estimates. The arithmetic sometimes has a better effect than probability-box arithmetic (interval arithmetic) in dealing with dependency problem. Bayesian network is a commonly used model in reliability assessment. Under Bayesian network framework, this paper proposes a dependency bounds analysis method that combines affine arithmetic and probability-box method to handle hybrid uncertainty and non-deterministic dependency. For the sake of illustration, this method is applied to two real systems. To show the advantages of the proposed method, the proposed method is compared with the Frechet inequalities and 2-stage Monte Carlo method in the second case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distributed localization in wireless sensor networks is essential for verifying the positions of the sensor nodes deployed in the sensing field based on information interactions. However, the information transmitted from the controller to the actuator for each sensor node may be lost owing to communication noise, channel interference, or network congestion. With this in mind, this paper aims at investigating the distributed localization for wireless sensor networks subject to random lossy links. The barycentric coordinate, which can be determined by the distance measurements between node pairs in the network, is used as the basic scheme for range-based localization. First, based on the characterization of random link loss in wireless sensor networks with a Bernoulli random variable, a distributed iterative localization algorithm is proposed. And then, the global convergence of the proposed localization algorithm which ensures accurate localization is theoretically proved by using the convergence of sub-stochastic matrices' product. Finally, numerical examples are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed localization algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]