Accession Number:

ADA151033

Title:

Properties of Systems Which Lead to Efficient Computation of Reliability.

Descriptive Note:

Technical rept.,

Corporate Author:

NORTH CAROLINA UNIV AT CHAPEL HILL CURRICULUM IN OPERATIONS RESEARCH AND SYSTEMS ANALYSIS

Personal Author(s):

• Ball,M. O.
• Provan,J. S.

Report Date:

1984-08-01

Pagination or Media Count:

9.0

Abstract:

One of the most widely used approaches to computing systems reliability is to represent the system structure in terms of a Boolean sum of all minpaths. This expression is then transformed into a sum of disjoint terms. The probability of each term is then summed to obtain the reliability of the system. A key question with respect to the difficulty of this process relates to the ability to transform the initial sum into a sum of disjoint products. In this paper, the authors show that for the class of shellable systems, there always exists a disjoint product expression with a number of terms equal to the number of minpaths. The authors provide several examples of shellable systems for which an expression can be efficiently found.

Descriptors:

• *COMPUTATIONS
• *RELIABILITY
• *SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
• *NUMERICAL METHODS AND PROCEDURES
• ALGORITHMS
• LINEAR SYSTEMS
• PROBABILITY
• COHERENCE
• APPROXIMATION(MATHEMATICS)
• BOOLEAN ALGEBRA

Subject Categories:

• Administration and Management
• Statistics and Probability

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE