New Importance Measures for Multistate Systems
Abstract
In this study, two new importance measures for multistate systems are introduced and evaluated. These new importance measures improve the existing performance-based importance measures by considering the contributions of component states to the total throughput of a system during a defined time period. It is found that the existing performance-based importance measures study the instantaneous throughput rates of systems rather than the total throughput during a defined time period. The limitations of such approach are illustrated and the usefulness of the proposed importance measures is demonstrated.Although importance measures are used for different purposes, the focus of this study is only on how these importance measures can optimize corrective maintenance tasks during maintenance opportunities. The existing measures are studied in this context and their usefulness is discussed regarding their capability to optimize maintenance results.