Criticality and sensitivity analysis of the components of a system

In the design of complex systems there is a great interest to know the relative importance of each of their elements. In this paper, we define a new method for measuring the relative importance of each element of the system. We have to specify that this paper concerns only non-repairable systems and components. We present a way of calculating the criticality of each component for a complex system no matter what the random distribution of the life of the component is. The paper also demonstrates a simple way of calculating how the system life improves when the life of a component is improved.