Reliability Analysis of Biased Majority-Vote Systems
Sargur N. Srihari · IEEE Transactions on Reliability · 1982
Majority-vote systems (n-modular redundancy) are commonly used in the synthesis of reliable digital systems from unreliable components. This note presents a generalized analysis of the reliability of majority voting in terms of the conditional reliabilities of voters. The model is able to handle the case of identically distributed statistically-biased binary voters which favor one type of decision over another. The main conclusion is that for arbitrarily large n- 1. If both voter conditional reliabilities exceed 1/2, the majority-vote system is perfectly reliable. 2. If only one of the two conditional reliabilities exceeds ½, even with average voter reliability greater than ½, there exists an optimum finite number of modules at which the majority-vote system has peak reliability.