Ordering heuristics for reliability evaluation of multistate systems using multistate multivalued decision diagrams

Abstract

Many real-world engineering systems are multistate systems which are made up of the components that can work at different performance levels. It has been reported that the evaluation of multistate system reliability is an NP-hard problem. Thus, it is important to find an efficient method to analyze the reliability of such systems. In this paper, the multistate multivalued decision diagram (MMDD) method is used to evaluate the system reliability given all minimal path vectors (d-MPs for short). Because the size of the MMDD is highly affected by the order of the components, which ultimately affect the efficiency of the method. Two ordering heuristics are proposed for ordering components in d-MPs before they are used to develope the corresponding MMDD. Illustrative examples are provided, which validate the correctness and advantages of the proposed heuristics.