Importance and Sensitivity Analysis on Complex Repairable Systems and Imprecise System Reliability

Abstract

The identification of the components which are responsible for the
performance of system is a key task to improve the safety and reliability.
However, such analysis is difficult and challenging when large and
complex systems are analyzed. The survival signature which is presented
recently cannot only hold the merits of the former system signature
but is efficient to deal with complex system with multiply component
types. In real engineering applications, components can be repaired
after failure. Hence, it is essential to identify which component or
component set is most critical the complex repairable system. What
is more, due to lack of data or the confidential information, it is
difficult to know the full configuration of the system, which leads to an
imprecise survival signature. In order to address the above questions, the
efficient simulation approaches based on structure function and survival
signature have been proposed respectively to analyze the complex
repairable systems. Based on this, component importance index has
been introduced to perform sensitivity analysis on a specific component
or a set of components within the repairable system. In addition, the
proposed simulation method can be used to deal with imprecision within
the survival signature. Numerical examples are presented to show the
applicability of the above approaches.