4. Conclusion

With the ever-increased high requirement of reliability and safety for critical equipment, accurately performing the reliability evaluation of the mechanical systems, such as solar arrays, gains much attention in recent years. The proposed method for reliability evaluation by FRPN can be used to solve the problem on how to describe the relationship among the different components and how to overcome data deficiency. The FRPN based models may open up a new way for evaluating complex mechanical systems with multi-state operation in variable working environment.
