Innovative approaches for addressing old challenges in component importance measures

Importance measures (IM) are component related indices that allow assessing how a component in a system affects one or more system level performance functions. While several IM have been presented in the literature, challenges still remain with respect to the following: (1) multiple ranking—multiple perspective, (2) multi-component importance and, (3) multi-function importance. To address these challenges, this paper proposes set of innovative solutions based on several available techniques: Hasse diagram, Copeland score and Multi-objective optimization. As such, the purpose of this research is twofold: first propose solutions and second foster new research to address these challenges. Each of the proposed solutions is exemplified with a working example.