Pair importance measures in systems analysis

摘要

Importance measures in systems unreliability (or unavailability) analysis provide useful information in identifying components which are critical with regard to the availability or reliability of a system. Various importance measures known in the reliability literature are defined for a single component. This paper extends previous work to define importance measures for a pair of components of the system (accident sequence, core damage frequency, or health risks as appropriate), and illustrates the usefulness of these pairwise importance measures in nuclear power plants. The pairwise importance measures are immediately applicable to risk-based evaluation of the technical specifications; in addition, pairwise importances could play an important role in systems interaction studies by highlighting pairs of events between which a coupling would be significant if it existed.