Holistic reliability analysis of weighted voting systems from a multi-state perspective

Abstract

The computation of the reliability of weighted voting systems is an important problem in reliability theory due to its potential application in security, target identification, safety and monitoring areas. Voting systems are used in a wide variety of applications where an acceptance or rejection decision has to be made about a binary proposition presented to the system. For these systems, it is of interest to obtain the probability so that based on the vote of decision-making units, the system aggregates these votes into the right decision when presented with such a proposition. This paper presents a holistic work on weighted voting system reliability by presenting modeling, computation, estimation and optimization techniques. The modeling part takes advantage of the structure of weighted voting systems to present a model of its reliability as a multi-state system. Next, based on the multi-state view of the system, an exact computational approach based on multi-state minimal cut and path vectors is introduced. The paper then acknowledges the computational complexity of the problem and provides a Monte Carlo simulation approach that estimates system reliability accurately and in an efficient computational time. Finally, an optimization heuristic that generates quasi-optimal solutions is presented that is able to solve the problem of maximizing the reliability of a weighted voting system based on a specified number of decision-making units with known reliability characteristics.

A simplified approach for reliability evaluation and component allocation in three-state series and parallel systems composed of non-identical components

“…A vast literature focused on reliability concepts and estimation (KAPUR; LAMBERSON, 1977;O'CONNOR, 1985;CHING et al, 2005;ELSAYED, 2006;VIERTL, 2008;NEIL et al, 2008), optimization, allocation and redundancy SMITH, 1995;MAJETY et al, 1999;KUO, 2000;ELEGBEDE;CHU, 2003;RAMIREZ -MARQUEZ et al, 2004aBIER, 2007;LIANG et al, 2008) has emerged in recent years. Intense effort has also been devoted to the multistate problem (LISNIANSKI; LEVITIN, 2003;MUSELLI, 2005;RAMIREZ-MARQUEZ;COIT, 2004bCOIT, , 2005RAMIREZ-MARQUEZ et al, 2006a, 2006bTIAN et al, 2008;RAMIREZ-MARQUEZ;.…”

“…Major efforts performed in this field seem to be focused on (i) the development of methods to evaluate the reliability of systems composed of identical and non-identical components, and (ii) on the optimization of a system reliability subjected to structural constraints (LEVITIN; LISNIANSKI, 2001;RAMIREZ-MARQUEZ;.…”

“…Also using GA techniques, Levitin (2002a) has suggested an algorithm to identify the optimal structure of systems composed of different open and short failure probability devices; the approach followed a series-parallel configuration. In addition, an optimization heuristic for maximizing the reliability of multi-state weighted voting systems based on a defined number of components with known reliability properties was suggested in Ramirez-Marquez (2008).…”