A new approach for determining the most important system components and the budget-constrained system reliability improvement

Abstract

Article citation info:ponents' reliability on the overall system reliability is usually done by using importance measures. The concept of importance measures, originally introduced by Birnbaum [2] and Vesely [23], has been significantly changed and improved over time. Structural and probabilistic importance measures are used most often, but a small number of importance measures that take into account the costs of improving the reliability of the individual components have also been developed over the last few years [12,24]. A common feature of the majority of importance measures is that component's importance to the system functioning and failure is determined based on the calculated value of a chosen importance measure [27]. Therefore, the general procedure IntroductionImprovement of the reliability of a complex system, besides providing redundancy of components, is achieved by improving the reliability of the individual components that have the greatest impact on the overall reliability of the system. In this paper, we consider a complex system as a system with multiple interactions between many different components [15] in which the behavior of the system cannot be easily and directly induced from the behavior of its components [3]. Within the context of reliability, main characteristics of a complex system are: large number of components, cut sets, path sets or components' states dependencies [7]. Analysis of the impact of the com- PAvlović P, MAkAjić-Nikolić D, vujošević M. A new approach for determining the most important system components and the budget-constrained system reliability improvement. eksploatacja i Niezawodnosc -Maintenance and Reliability 2017; 19 (3): 413-419, http:// dx the number of the most important components which should be prevented is often limited due to the available budget. Using pre-known minimal cut sets, a mathematical model based on the Budgeted Maximum Coverage Problem is proposed. By its optimization, the simultaneous determination of all of the most important components whose total expenses do not exceed the limited overall budget is achieved. The new approach was tested by a series of experiments conducted over a set of test examples. The results of the experiments were compared with the results obtained using two commonly used cost importance measures. Keywords

Stress-strength interference-based importance for series systems considering common cause failure

“…So many new kinds of importance measures are proposed, such as F-V importance measure [13,31], BP structure importance measure [1], critical importance measure [19], risk achievement worth (RAW), risk reduction worth (RRW) [32], improvement potential importance [38], and differential importance measure [5]. In recent years, some researchers have been extended importance measures to by considering the maintenance policy [9,10], the transition rate increases over time [8], or the constraints on cost for improving the system reliability [24].…”