On Birnbaum importance assessment for aging multi-state system under minimal repair by using the Lz-transform method

This paper considers a reliability importance evaluation for components in an aging multi-state system. In practical reliability engineering a “curse of dimensionality” (the large number of states that should be analyzed for a multi-state system model) is a main obstacle for importance assessment. In order to challenge the problem, this paper proposes a new method that is based on an LZ-transform of the discrete-state continuous-time Markov process and on Ushakov׳s Universal Generating Operator. The paper shows that the proposed method can drastically reduce a computational burden. In order to illustrate the method, a solution of a real world problem is presented as a numerical example.