Analysis of Multi-state Systems with Multi-state Components Using EVMDDs

This paper proposes a new analysis method of multi-state systems with multi-state components using multi-valued decision diagrams (MDDs). The multi-state systems with multi-state components can be considered as multi-valued functions, called structure functions. Since the structure functions are usually monotone increasing functions, they can be represented compactly using edge-valued MDDs (EVMDDs). This paper proposes an efficient analysis method using EVMDDs. It shows that by using EVMDDs, the structure functions can be represented more compactly than existing methods using ordinary MDDs, and systems can be analyzed with comparable computation time.