EFFECTIVE COMPONENT IMPORTANCE ANALYSIS FOR THE MAINTENANCE OF SYSTEMS WITH COMMON-CAUSE FAILURES

摘要

In this paper, we consider the component importance analysis of coherent systems subject to common-cause failures. The purpose of component importance analysis is to obtain information regarding a component's contribution or importance to the system reliability. The results from the component importance analysis are key contributors to the system design, tuning, and maintenance activities. Various measures have been proposed for the component importance analysis, but little work has been done to compare their performance. In this research, we investigate and compare a set of nine existing importance measures and select the most informative and appropriate one for guiding the system maintenance activity. An important concern in the traditional fault tree reliability analysis, common-cause failures, is also considered in the component importance analysis. An example is designed and analyzed to show the selection process and to illustrate our efficient method for considering the effects of common-cause failures in the component importance analysis.