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.