A method of calculating the top event probability of a fault tree, where dynamic gates and repeated events are included and the occurrences of basic events follow nonexponential distributions, is proposed. The method is on the basis of the Bayesian network formulation for a DFT proposed by Yuge and Yanagi [1]. The formulation had a difficulty in calculating a sequence probability if components have nonexponential failure distributions. We propose an alternative method to obtain the sequence probability in this paper. First, a method in the case of the Erlang distribution is discussed. Then, Tijms's fitting procedure is applied to deal with a general distribution. The procedure gives a mixture of two Erlang distributions as an approximate distribution for a general distribution given the mean and standard deviation. A numerical example shows that our method works well for complex systems.

A new UEP technique for image transmission using trellis code based on Hamming distance criterion has been proposed. The simulation results comparing the image quality and bit-rate for UEP and EEP have been provided. The results show that UEP performs better than EEP in terms of bit-rate without any significant depreciation in image quality.

Kumar and Billinton have presented a new technique for obtaining the steady-state probabilities from a flow graph based on Markov model. By examining the graph and choosing suitable input and output nodes, the steady-state probabilities can be obtained directly by using the flow graph. In this paper this graphical technique is applied for a k-out-of-n: G repairable system. Consequently a new derivation way of the formulae for the steady-state availability and MTBF is obtained.