Integrated importance measure of binary coherent systems

Importance measure in reliability engineering is applied to find the weakest component in a system. Traditional importance measures for the binary coherent systems mainly concern reliability importance of an individual component or its structural importance separately, but seldom consider the reliabilities, structures and causalities of the components as a whole. In order to solve the problem above, first of all, four kinds of popular component importance measures are discussed and their calculation methods based on probability distributions are also provided. Then, based on the limitations of such importance measures in system analysis, the integrated importance measure for the binary coherent systems is presented to describe the mathematical expectation of the system reliability decrease based on the current component failure rate. Finally, the simulation study is illustrated based on three typical connection systems. The results show the differences of five importance measures and prove the effectiveness of the integrated importance measure.