Operation comfort vs. the importance of system components

TL;DR

This paper reviews importance measures of system components in reliability analysis, discusses their motivation, and introduces a new game-theoretic severity measure considering system structure, reliability, and maintenance.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive discussion of existing importance measures and proposes a novel game-theoretic severity measure for system components.

Findings

Discusses motivation behind importance measures

Introduces a new game-theoretic severity measure

Considers system structure, reliability, and maintenance

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to look at the measures of importance of components in systems in terms of reliability. In the first work of Birnbaum (1968) on this subject, many interesting studies were created and important indicators were constructed that allowed to organize the components of complex systems. They are helpful in analyzing the reliability of the designed systems, establishing the principles of operation and maintenance. The significance measures presented here are collected and discussed regarding the motivation behind their creation. They concern an approach in which both elements and systems are binary, and the possibility of generalization to multistate systems is only mentioned. Among the discussed is one new proposal using the methods of game theory, combining the sensitivity to the structure of the system and the operational effects on the system performance. The presented severity measures use a knowledge of the system structure as well as reliability and wear and tear, and whether the components can be repaired and maintained.