Reliability sensitivity analysis of coherent systems based on survival signature

Abstract

The reliability sensitivity can be used to rank distribution parameters of system components concerning their impacts on the system’s reliability. Such information is essential to purposes such as component prioritization, reliability improvement, and risk reduction of a system. In this article, we present an efficient method for reliability sensitivity analysis of coherent systems using survival signature. The survival signature is applied to calculate the reliability of coherent systems. The reliability importance of components is derived analytically to evaluate the relative importance of the component with respect to the overall reliability of the system. The closed-form formula for the reliability sensitivity of the system with respect to component’s distribution parameters is derived from the derivative of lifetime distribution of a component to further investigate the impacts of the distribution parameters on the system’s reliability. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approaches are demonstrated with two numerical examples.