System Importance Measures: Definitions and Application to System-of-Systems Analysis

Abstract

Resilience is the ability to withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. While this attribute has been the focus of research in several fields, in the case of system-of-systems (SoS), addressing resilience is particularly interesting and challenging. In this research, we present a new set of importance measures to aid in the design and analysis of resilient systems. Our system importance measures (SIMs) are inspired by the component importance measures in reliability engineering but are designed to address the distinguishing features of resilience, in particular, its non-binary nature. The SIMs facilitate rapid identification of vulnerable areas within the SoS. The SIM-based resilience design process allows designers to (1) determine the relative importance of different systems based on their impacts on overall resilience, and (2) improve overall resilience by drawing from design options that leverage system-specific characteristics. We demonstrate the calculation and use of the SIMs using a naval warfare SoS.