A Study of Common-Mode Failures

Edwards, G. T., & Watson, I. A. (1979). A Study of Common-Mode Failures. UKAEA Systems Reliability Service, Report SRD R146.

Type

Report

Intellectual base

Grey literature

Year

1979

Link

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5236300

Cited from

systems_cybernetics

Cited by

2 citations across 2 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Apparent Variety Masks Shared Driver
  • In engineering reliability, redundant components from the same supplier, firmware, lot, or room exhibit common-mode failure behind apparent N-way redundancy.

    This sourceDefines and classifies common-mode (common-cause) failure: redundant components sharing a supplier, lot, design, or environment fail together, so N-way redundancy provides far less protection than the count implies.

• Dependency Distribution Concentration
  • From these several reusable inferences follow. Concentration is a system property, not a provider property: diversifying without checking common-mode upstream correlations yields apparent diversification with concentrated true dependency. Tail risk dominates expected loss: when losses are convex in provider unavailability, the concentration measure dominates the average reliability measure in determining tail outcomes. The "two of everything" heuristic is wrong by default: naive duplication does not deconcentrate if both copies share upstream common modes, since effective deconcentration requires independence of failure, a property of the joint distribution rather than the count.

    This sourceFoundational reliability-engineering treatment of common-cause/common-mode failure, establishing that redundant copies sharing a common mode fail together — effective deconcentration requires independence of failure, not mere duplication.

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