Recent Patents on Importance Measures for System Reliability Improvement

Background: In attempting to achieve high reliability for a system, a basic problem of the system analysts is how to evaluate the relative component importance. Importance measures are used to evaluate the component contribution to system reliability. The patents related to importance measures and their applications in system reliability have been studied. Contents of most patents are related to system identification, component ranks, reliability improvement, and classification. Methods: In this paper, some importance measures, such as the improvement potential, Birnbaum importance and Fussell-Vesely importance, are analyzed to identify the most important component for system reliability improvement. Results: The related properties of importance measures are derived. The change of system reliability is obtained by improving the component reliability in terms of importance measures. Conclusion: In order to identify the most important component, and get the maximal system reliability improvement, the proposed method is a useful guide to determine which component should be managed. Keywords: System reliability, improvement, patent, importance measure, component, property.