Importance analysis of different components in a multicomponent system under fuzzy inputs

In the structural system with multiple components under fuzzy inputs, the influence of each component on system failure needs to be considered, because it is of great significance to simplify the system model as well as improve the system's performance. In this paper, the criticality fuzzy safety importance measure of the multicomponent system under fuzzy inputs is first defined to measure the contribution of each component to the system failure. The defined criticality fuzzy safety importance measure can be applied to fault diagnosis, i.e., when a system fails, the component with the largest importance is the most probable component causing failure, thus should be checked first. Then, a method combining the multivariate Gaussian process and fuzzy simulation is proposed to estimate the criticality fuzzy safety importance measure and rank the importance of components by taking the correlation of components into consideration. Finally, several examples are employed to analyze the component importance as well as to illustrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method.