ON JOINT IMPORTANCE MEASURES FOR MULTISTATE RELIABILITY SYSTEMS

Abstract

The use of importance and joint importance measures to identify the weak areas of a system and signify the roles of components in either causing or contributing to proper functioning of the system, is explained by several researchers in system engineering. But a few research outputs are available in literature for finding joint importance measures for two or more components. This paper introduces, new Joint Reliability Achievement Worth (JRAW), Joint Reliability Reduction Worth (JRRW) and Joint Reliability Fussell-Vesely measure (JRFV) for two components, of a multistate system. This is a new approach to find out the joint effect of group of components in improving system reliability. A steady state performance level distribution with restriction to the component’s states is used to evaluate the proposed measures. Universal generating function (UGF) technique is applied for the evaluation of proposed joint importance measures. An illustrative example is provided