Multiple-valued Decision Diagrams for Multi-state System Performability Analysis

Abstract

Background: In a multi-state system, either the entire system or its components will have more than two states. Different kind of multi-state systems have been investigated, such as multistate series-parallel systems, multi-state k-out-of-n systems and multi-state linear consecutive-k-outof- n systems. Methods: Performability analysis is concerned with the calculation of probability distribution of different system performance levels. In this paper, Multi-valued Decision Diagram (MDD) based approaches are discussed to conduct the performability analysis of multi-state systems. Results: Examples are provided to illustrate the use of MDD approaches for three types of multistate systems, e.g. multi-state series-parallel systems, multi-state k-out-of-n systems and multi-state linear consecutive-k-out-of-n systems. Conclusion: The empirical results show that the MDD approaches have lower computational complexity than the traditional methods in model generation and evaluation.