Relationships between importance measures and redundancy in systems with dependent components

Abstract

The paper shows the connections between some importance indices for the components in an engineering coherent system and the performance of the system obtained when a redundancy mechanism is applied to a specific component. A copula approach is used to model the dependency among the components. This approach includes the popular case of independent components. Under some assumptions, it is proved that if component i is more important than component j, then the system obtained by applying a redundancy procedure to the ith component is better, under different stochastic criteria, than that obtained with the jth component. These results can be applied to several redundancy mechanisms. A new importance index is defined to study active redundancies. Some illustrative examples are provided.