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Common-cause failures (CCF): beta-factor / MGL / alpha-factor #44

Description

@derrynknife

Add common-cause failure models (beta-factor, Multiple Greek Letter, alpha-factor) that couple otherwise-independent components through a shared failure cause.

The independence assumption is currently baked into the exact engine, so CCF is a meaningful generalisation — and it is essential for credibility with safety-critical users (nuclear, process, rail, aerospace).

Estimate

Effort: L (~1–2 weeks) · Value: High


Shipped in PR #65 as CCFGroup(members, model) on NonRepairableRBD (ccf_groups=):

  • Beta-factor (BetaFactor(beta)) — all-or-nothing shared cause.
  • Multiple Greek Letter (MGL(beta, gamma, ...)) — partial common causes (a cause failing some but not all of a group); MGL(beta) on two members is exactly BetaFactor(beta).
  • Alpha-factor — a data-estimable reparameterisation of the same multiplicities as MGL; deferred as a follow-up.

The exact engine is not rewritten: system reliability is computed by conditioning on each group's mutually-exclusive shock outcomes and reusing the ordinary independent system_probability per branch, so beta = 0 reproduces the independent result exactly. Honoured by sf()/ff() and persisted through serialisation; probability-dependent importance/sensitivity and condition-based methods raise a clear error on a CCF RBD for now (structural_importance, being probability-free, is unaffected).

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