Abstract
A method for approximately computing the frequency of system failures is proposed. The method uses multilinear polynomials to compute lower and upper bounds of system availability and transforms these bounds into lower and upper bounds of the system failure frequency without increasing the computational complexity. Most of the currently used high-speed approximation methods that compute the lower and upper bounds of availability use multilinear polynomials, so it is a relatively simple matter to transform these methods into new ones for computing the failure frequency while preserving their speed and accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can quickly and accurately compute the system failure frequency.
