Reliability analysis of performance-based balanced systems with common bus performance sharing

•The system is balanced if the performance of each component is the same.•Rebalancing system is achieved by sharing performances among all components.•The failure of rebalancing the system performance is considered.•System reliability is obtained by combining Markov process and the UGF technique.•Battery balancing of lithium battery pack is used to show application of the model. In this paper, a performance-based balanced system with common bus performance sharing is established. The system consists of n components connected by a common bus. Each component has its individual performance which can be shared among all components via the common bus. The system is balanced if the performance of each component is the same and it can be rebalanced by redistributing performances among all components via the common bus if the system is out of balance. The system fails when the system is out of balance after performance sharing or the total performance of the system is less than a predetermined value, whichever occurs first. A Markov process is employed to describe the performance variation of each component and the universal generating function technique is applied to obtain analytical solution of the system reliability. A specific analysis of battery balancing of lithium battery pack is given to show the application of the proposed model and effectiveness of the proposed method.