ABSTRACT
One of the principal tasks of reliability analysis is identification of those system components that have the greatest influence on system activity. Solving this task requires creation of a model of the system. This model has to carries information about the dependency between the activity of the system components and the total activity of the system. This dependency is expressed in the form of the structure function. For a system consisting of n components, the structure function represents the following map (Rausand & Høyland 2004, Kuo & Zhu 2012):
where xi is a variable defining state of the i-th system component (value 0 means that the component is failed, while value 1 agrees with the functioning component), for i = 1,2,…,n, and x = (x1, x2, . . . , xn) is a vector of states of the system components (state vector). The system can also be in one of two possible states (state 0 or state 1) whose interpretation is same as in the case of component states.
