Identification of Most Important Group of Three Components in a Repairable Multistate System

Most of the reliability analysis is devoted to binary state systems. But in systems like Nuclear power systems, oil transportation systems, power generation systems, binary modeling is an over simplification. In such situations, multistate modeling is preferred. Reliability analysis for the multistate system with repairable components is to be explored more. Identification of important components or groups of components with regard to their performances like reliability, risk, availability, unavailability, expected system output performance etc. is very crucial to give proper maintenance and repair activities. In this paper, measures of joint importance of components for repairable multistate systems, based on the classical Birnbaum approach, are studied. Birnbaum measure is generic because it relies on the structure of the system and its component’s probabilistic nature. These measures are useful when a researcher considers a system with repairable components.