A novel fuzzy reliability method for the marine power plant under different intuitionistic fuzzy environments

In marine engineering, the reliability of marine power plants is crucial for ensuring the safety and operational efficiency of seagoing vessels. Challenges in maintaining reliability may arise from the complexity and inherent uncertainty of marine environments. Traditional reliability assessment methods often do not precisely capture the ambiguities and stochastic nature of marine operations, leading to safety and performance gaps. Therefore, fuzzy sets were used to evaluate system reliability, where each component’s reliability were expressed by a fuzzy number. However, in complex systems, experts face difficulties in precisely determining membership functions for component failures. To address these issues of traditional and fuzzy fault tree methods, this paper proposes a novel reliability calculation method based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets. In this method, the failure probabilities of basic events in the system fault tree are considered as different intuitionistic fuzzy numbers and weakest \(t\) $t$ -norm based approximate arithmetic operations are performed over these different intuitionistic fuzzy numbers to spread the uncertainty up to a significant level. By applying the proposed method, we have developed the fuzzy reliability models for both series and parallel systems. In this study, a marine power plant system is taken as a numerical example to verify the proposed method. The results obtained using the proposed method are compared with those obtained using traditional and fuzzy fault tree methods.