MBDD versus MMDD for Multistate Systems Analysis

Many combinatorial reliability models assume binary designation of states for both systems and their components. In many real applications, however, systems and their components may have more than two states (or levels of performance) varying from perfect operation to complete failure. In this paper, we present two combinatorial decision diagram based models that have been proposed for the analysis of multistate systems: multistate binary decision diagrams (MBDD) based approach and multistate multivalued decision diagrams (MMDD) based approach. And we conduct an empirical performance comparison between those two methods in terms of model size and computational complexity via two illustrative examples.