The degradation and recovery processes are multi-scale phenomena in many physical, engineering, biological, and social systems, and determine the aging of the entire system. Therefore, understanding the interplay between the two processes at the component level is the key to evaluate the reliability of the system. Based on the principle of maximum entropy, an approach is proposed to model and infer the processes at the component level, and is applied to repairable and non-repairable systems. By incorporating the reliability block diagram, this approach allows for integrating the information of network connectivity and statistical moments to infer the hazard or recovery rates of the degradation or recovery processes. The overall approach is demonstrated with numerical examples.
Keywords: complex network; hazard rate function; maximum entropy principle; statistical inference.