Involving the customer in the development and evaluation of multistate reliability models

It is pointed out that discrete multistate models require customer interaction at every step of their development. The customer defines the appropriate number of component and system states, provides the desired system lifetime used to estimate the probability distributions of the components, and defines the function that relates the component states to the system state by specifying when a change in state of any component forces a change in state of the system. With this information supplied by the customer, the probability distribution of the system is summarized with a performance measure specified by the customer