Component reliability importance measure in presence of transient faults

Importance measures are widely used to characterize the contribution of components to the system performance such as reliability, availability, risk, etc, and thus give great help in identifying system weaknesses and prioritizing system improvement activities. Although much work has been carried out on component importance analysis, most studies only concern the consistent states of components within which components exhibit consistent performance until state changes happen. Unfortunately, field data shows that many transient faults in components may result in severe consequences without causing any state changes, and, this can lead to a misunderstanding of component importance. This paper focuses on the reliability importance analysis in presence of transient faults, and proposes a composite measure for evaluation. A sample series parallel system is analyzed to illustrate the use of this measure.