ANALYSIS OF JOINT RELIABILITY IMPORTANCE IN LINEAR m-CONSECUTIVE-k; l-OUT-OF-n:F SYSTEM.

Combinatorial techniques have anim portant role to com pute the joint reliability importance (J RI) of some coherent system s. We obtain combinatorial formula for calcu lation of the JR I of two com p onents in a generalised version of consecutive type systems consisting of nlinearly ordered comp onents such that system fails if and only if (iff) there are at least m l-overlapping runs of k consecutive failed components (n > m(k --l) + l,l < k). Overlapping runs mean having common elements which is denoted by l: We concentrate on both s-independent & identical components and exchangeable components. Explicit combinatorial formulae are provided for computing the JRI of the above mentioned cases. For both cases, we also compare the results with linear m-consecutive-k-out-of-n:F system (nonoverlapping case when l = 0). In addition, some numerical and illustrative examples are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]