Abstract:Relay is one kind of key components for systems such as spacecraft. Accurate reliability evaluation is essential for ensuring the safety and stability of the entire system. In the existing reliability studies of relays, the recoverable shocks resulting from factors such as materials and environment are not considered, which may cause inaccurate reliability evaluation results. To solve this problem, this article proposes degradation and shock models based on the modeling theories of Wiener process and discrete time Markov chain by incorporating natural degradation process, recoverable shock effect, and degradation correlation between performance parameters. Then, a multi-stage method to estimate model parameters is proposed to handle the problem that it is difficult to estimate all the model parameters simultaneously. Furthermore, for the reliability evaluation, an approximate calculation method of reliability is proposed by using the Monte Carlo technique. Results show that the proposed reliability evaluation method can ensure a favorable accuracy, and the corresponding goodness of fitting is 0. 103 7, which is about 70% higher than the existing methods.