ON B?RNBAUM'S MEASURE OF COMPONENT IMPORTANCE OF COHERENT SYSTEMS

Abstract

Together with rapidly developing technology, nowadays, plenty of complex systems have emerged and some algorithms for reliabilities of these systems have been developed. System analysts have realized that one of the factors which affects the system reliability is importance of the components forming the system, so they have developed various methods which measure component?s importance. In this area, the first study was made by Birnbaum (Birnbaum, 1969:581-592). In this study, the reliabilities of coherent consecutive k-out-of-n:G systems and the Birnbaum?s component importance of these systems are investigated. For this purpose, Birnbaum?s importance measures of components of k-out-of-n:G systems are computed with Monte-Carlo simulations repeated by using different random numbers. In particular, the reliabilities of consecutive k-out-of-5:G systems and Birnbaum?s importance measures of components which belong to these systems are analyzed.