Customer-driven reliability models for multistate coherent systems

Reliability models for multistate coherent systems require customer interaction. The customer defines the distinctive component and system states. Knowing the component states, the authors estimate the probability distribution for each component. The customer specifies when a change in the state of any component forces a change in the state of the system. From this, the authors present a methodology to develop the customer's structure function and to calculate the probability of each system state. The customer defines and evaluates reliability. Using the customer's definition, one can summarize the probability distribution of the system