Computing Birnbaum and Barlow-Proschan importance measures using system signature

Abstract

Component importance measures are widely used in engineering and reliability analysis in testing the safety of running systems. There are several component importance measures to realize which components in a coherent system play a more important role than the others. The most common ones belong to Birnbaum and Barlow & Proschan. In this paper a new method, based on the number of path sets with exactly i working components such that the component at sth place functions, has been proposed to evaluate these two measures for all types of systems appearing in the literature.