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Technology Stocks : Discuss Year 2000 Issues
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To: John Mansfield who wrote (4921)3/21/1999 4:52:00 PM
From: Howard Clark  Read Replies (1) of 9818
 
The Mills calculation is based on estimating the number of single points of failure in a power plant, i.e. estimating the probability that the failure of a single embedded component could shut the plant down.

I have to admit to complete ignorance of power plant design, so I will ask anyone to comment on the likelyhood that the failure of a single component could result in the loss of operation of an entire plant.

In general, the fact of interdependency is often sited by alarmists as exponentially raising the odds of an entire infrastructure collapse. For example given:

S1 --> S2

where S1 and S2 are interdependent systems each having a reliability of 90%, the overall reliability of the system is only 81%. One question I have not seen addressed in this forum is whether and the extent to which interdependency is mitigated by redundancy. In the example above, if R1 and R2 are independent systems having the same reliability as S1 and S2, i.e.

S1 --> S2
< >
R1 --> R2

the overall reliability of the system is 96.39%. (To be truly independent, R1 and R2 must not depend on the same software or firmware as S1 and S2 that may be Y2K non-compliant. In fact R1 and
R2 may represent manual procedures that are employed in the failure of automated systems.)

As an additional point on the power plant situation, I believe I read somewhere (sorry can't recall the source) that the electricity grid problems will be partly mitigated by the fact that the century rollover occurs in the dead of winter when power consumption is lower than in peak air conditioning season.
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