Component state-based integrated importance measure for multi-state systems

Importance measures in reliability engineering are used to identify weak components and/or states in contributing to the reliable functioning of a system. Traditionally, importance measures do not consider the possible effect of groups of transition rates among different component states, which, however, has great effect on the component probability distribution and should therefore be taken into consideration. This paper extends the integrated importance measure (IIM) to estimate the effect of a component residing at certain states on the performance of the entire multi-state systems. This generalization of IIM describes in which state it is most worthy to keep the component to provide the desired level of system performance, and which component is the most important to keep in some state and above for improving the performance of the system. An application to an oil transportation system is presented to illustrate the use of the suggested importance measure. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.