A new approach to system reliability

Abstract

Calculating system-reliability via the knowledge of structure function is not new. Such attempts have been made in the classical 1975 book by Barlow & Proschan. But they had to compromise with the increasing complexity of a system. This paper overcomes this problem through a new representation of the structure function, and demonstrates that the well-known systems considered in the state-of-art follow this new representation. With this new representation, the important reliability calculations, such as Birnbaum reliability-importance, become simple. The Chaudhuri, et al. (J. Applied Probability, 1991) bounds which exploit the knowledge of structure function were implemented by our simple and easy-to-use algorithm for some s-coherent structures,viz,s-series,s-parallel, 2-out-of-3:G, bridge structure, and a fire-detector system.