Measures of Component Importance in Nonrepairable and Repairable Multistate Strongly Coherent Systems

In Natvig and G̊asemyr (2009) dynamic and stationary measures of importance of a component in a binary system were considered. To arrive at explicit results the performance processes of the components were assumed to be independent and the system to be coherent. Especially the Barlow-Proschan and the Natvig measures were treated in detail and a series of new results and approaches were given. For the case of components not undergoing repair it was shown that both measures are sensible. Reasonable measures of component importance for repairable systems represent a challenge. A basic idea here is also to take a so-called dual term into account. For a binary coherent system, according to the extended Barlow-Proschan measure a component is important if there are high probabilities both that its failure is the cause of system failure and that its repair is the cause of system repair. Even with this extension results for the stationary Barlow-Proschan measure are not satisfactory. For a binary coherent system, according to the extended Natvig measure a component is important if both by failing it strongly reduces the expected system uptime and by being repaired it strongly reduces the expected system downtime. With this extension the results for the stationary Natvig measure seem very sensible. In the present paper most of these results are generalized to multistate strongly coherent systems. For such systems little has been published until now on measures of component importance even in the nonrepairable case.