Binary Decision Diagrams in reliability analysis of standard system structures

Abstract

One of the current issues of reliability analysis is investigation of complex systems consisting of many components. Investigation of such systems requires developing efficient methods for their representation. One of the possible ways is use of Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) that allow storing information about system topology in an efficient way. However, the main problem behind BDDs is how to create a good BDD. In this paper, we focus on construction of BDDs for common system structures such as series, parallel and k-out-of-n. Using these results, we present a method for creation of a good BDD for k-to-l-out-of-n systems, which are a typical instance of noncoherent systems. In the next phase, we use BDDs and logical differential calculus to develop an efficient method for importance analysis of k-to-l-out-of-n systems.