Study on reliability modeling of continuous systems like pipeline

Describes briefly researches on the reliability modeling of continuous systems in recent years, where the pipelines and wire cables are taken typically as examples. Discretizing a continuous system into a number of elements that can be considered as a series system, a probability density function of system strength is derived introducing the minimal order statistics. Discusses the reliability modeling of dependent failure to such series systems and the two influencing factors on their material strength, i.e., the materials' inhomogeneity and quality instability. Then, a reliability model is developed for continuous systems such as pipelines, which can reflect the failure-dependence among those elements. The model provides a basis for the reliability design/computation of continuous system including pipeline and wire cables.