Original version
Probability in the engineering and informational sciences (Print). 2020, 1-21, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269964820000340
Abstract
We suggest four new measures of importance for repairable multistate systems based on the classical Birnbaum measure. Periodic component life cycles and general semi-Markov processes are considered. Similar to the Birnbaum measure, the proposed measures are generic in the sense that they only depend on the probabilistic properties of the compo- nents and the system structure. The multistate system model encodes physical properties of the components and the system directly into the structure function. As a result, cal- culating importance is easy, especially in the asymptotic case. Moreover, the proposed measures are composite measures, combining importance for all component states into a unified quantity. This simplifies ranking of the components with respect to importance. The proposed measures can be characterized with respect to two features: forward-looking versus backward-looking and with respect to how criticality is measured. Forward-looking importance measures focus on the next component states, while backward-looking impor- tance measures focus on the previous component states. Two approaches to measuring criticality are considered: probability of criticality versus expected impact. Examples show that the different importance measures may result in unequal rankings.