Failure dependence and cascading failures: A literature review and research opportunities

The complexity of technical systems is escalating, and components within the systems are becoming more vulnerable to failure dependence. Failure dependence implies that the failure of one component or more components can influence the degradation of other components or trigger their failures. To provide a comprehensive understanding of failure dependence issues, a systematic literature review is carried out and critically analyzed in this article, specifically focusing on engineering and technical systems. An overview of key terminologies commonly associated with failure dependence is firstly provided. And then, studies from various perspectives, including reliability, maintenance, resilience, and sustainability are reviewed, with an emphasis on failure dependence models for each research area. Additionally, this study examines the related works applied to four types of complex engineering systems, including subsea systems, chemical industrial clusters, power grids, and traffic networks. The review investigates the failure dependence issues by screening both classical and state-of-the-art methodologies from holistic perspectives and various application fields, identifying future challenges and potential opportunities, which paves the way for future research.