APPROXIMATION OF RELIABILITY IMPORTANCE FOR CONTINUUM STRUCTURE FUNCTIONS

A continuum structure function(CSF) is a non-decreasing mapping from the unit hypercube to the unit interval. The reliability importance of component $i$ in a CSF at system level ${\alpha}$, $R_i({\alpha})$) say, is zero if and only if component $i$ is almost irrelevant to the system at level ${\alpha}$. A condition to check whether a component is almost irrelevant to the system is presented. It is shown that $R^{(m)}_i({\alpha}){\rightarrow}R_i({\alpha})$ uniformly as $m{\rightarrow}{\infty}$ where each $R^{(m)}_i({\alpha})$ is readily calculated.