ASSESSMENT OF THE STRUCTURAL IMPORTANCE MEASURE WITH MONTE CARLO SAMPLING

摘要

Qualitative importance measures evaluate the importance of the components considering their location and function within the given system. In this paper method for the assessment of the structural measure of importance (SMI) as a qualitative importance measures is developed and presented. The method is based on the application of the Monte Carlo sampling and utilizes minimal cut sets (MCS) assessed from the fault tree of the analyzed system. The number of critical states Bk for a given basic event k is used as qualitative importance measure. The developed method is applied on two test systems. First test system represents standards test system used in the reliability studies. The second test system represents safety system of a real nuclear power plant. Assessment of the structural importance measure and ranking of the components is done. Ranking of the components based on assessed structural importance measure is compared to the ranking by standard quantitative importance measure. Applicability of the obtained qualitative importance measure for improvement of the reliability and safety of the systems and nuclear power plants is discussed.