Multi-state component importance analysis using multi-state multi-valued decision diagrams

Component importance analysis helps identify the vulnerabilities within a system and quantify the criticality of the system components. Multistate component importance analysis poses unique challenges to the existing methods that are primarily based on binary state applications. This paper presents a multistate multivalued decision diagram based analytical method for multistate component importance analysis. The advantages of the proposed method are illustrated through the comparison to a Monte Carlo simulation based method and the detailed analysis of a case study.