A new approach to system reliability

Calculating system-reliability via the knowledge of structure function is not new. However, such attempts have had to compromise with the increasing complexity of a system. This paper overcomes this problem through a new representation of the structure function, and demonstrates that the well-known systems considered in the state-of-art follow this new representation. With this new representation, the important reliability calculations, such as Birnbaum reliability-importance, become simple. The Chaudhuri, et al. (1991) bounds which exploit the knowledge of structure function were implemented by our simple and easy-to-use algorithm for some s-coherent structures, viz, s-series, s-parallel, 2-out-of-3:G, bridge structure, and a fire-detector system. The Chaudhuri bounds are superior to the min-max and Barlow-Proschan bounds. This representation is useful in implementing the Chaudhuri bounds. With this representation of the structure function, the computation of important reliability measures such as the Birnbaum structural and reliability importance are easy. The use of Chaudhuri bounds is recommended for general use, especially when cost and/or time are critical. The C-H-A algorithm (in this paper) is simple and easy to use. It depends on the knowledge of the path sets of a given structure. Standard software packages are available to provide the minimal path sets of any s-coherent system. The C-H-A algorithm has been programmed in SAS, S-PLUS, and MATLAB