A New Approach for Efficient Computation of Joint Reliability Importance

Abstract

We propose a new method to compute the joint reliability importance which is a useful index for reliability design. The key idea is to apply a special matrix to the computation of the marginal reliability importance. The computational complexity of the existing algorithm for computing the joint reliability importance in terms of each pair of components is the product of the square of the number of components and the computational complexity of computing the reliability of the system. However, we found that a reduction in order to the product of the number of components and the computational complexity of computing the reliability of the system is possible if the system can be represented by a special type of directed graph or any combinatorial model when the sum of disjoint products method is used to compute the reliability of the system.