A New Study on Reliability Importance Analysis of Phased Mission Systems.

Reliability importance which serves to quantify the influence of each component (or each type of components) in each phase on the reliability of a phased mission system (PMS) plays an important role in security assessment and risk management. In this paper, we present a new and efficient method for reliability importance analysis of PMSs using the theory of survival signature. A new kind of survival signature is applied to assess the reliability of PMS with multiple types of components. A closed-form formula is derived to predict reliability importance of the PMS with respect to each type of components in each phase. The Birnbaum importance model is further extended to calculate the reliability importance of the PMS with respect to each component in each phase. Finally, two numerical examples are used to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]