Some Recent Advances on Importance Measures in Reliability

Abstract

Many importance measures have been proposed with respect to the diverse considerations of system performance, reflecting different probabilistic interpretations and potential applications. This paper studies importance measures in reliability, including their definitions, probabilistic interpretations, properties, computations, and comparability. It categorizes importance measures into the structure, reliability, and lifetime types based on the knowledge for determining them. It covers importance measures of individual components, and ones of pairs and groups of components. It also investigates importance measures in consecutive-k-out-of-n systems.