The reliability importance of components and prime implicants in coherent and non-coherent systems including total-order interactions

In the management of complex systems, knowledge of how components contribute to system performance is essential to the correct allocation of resources. Recent works have renewed interest in the properties of the joint (J) and differential (D) reliability importance measures. However, a common background for these importance measures has not been developed yet. In this work, we build a unified framework for the utilization of J and D in both coherent and non-coherent systems. We show that the reliability function of any system is multilinear and its Taylor expansion is exact at an order T. We then introduce a total order importance measure (D-T) that coincides with the exact portion of the change in system reliability associated with any (finite or infinitesimal) change in component reliabilities. We show that D-T synthesizes the Birnbaum, joint and differential importance of all orders in one unique indicator. We propose an algorithm that enables the numerical estimation of D-T by varying one probability at a time, making it suitable in the analysis of complex systems. Findings demonstrate that the simultaneous utilization of D-T and J provides reliability analysts with a complete dissection of system performance. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.