Importance Index of Components in Uncertain Reliability Systems

Importance measure is an index for estimating the importance of an individual component or a group of components in a reliability system. So far, the importance measures for components in stochastic reliability systems have been investigated. In order to calculate the importance of a component or a group of components in an uncertain reliability system, this paper proposes a new concept of importance index. Some formulas are given to calculate the importance index of a component and a group of components in an uncertain reliability system. Then, some special types of uncertain reliability systems such as uncertain series, parallel, parallel-series, series-parallel, bridge, and k-out-of-n systems are studied.