The use of imprecise component reliability distributions in reliability calculations

System reliability prediction can be needed when detailed data concerning each component are unavailable. This prevents data from various sources from being integrated by considering each source as a sample from the same population. For the Weibull distribution, fuzzy arithmetic is used to synthesize a single fuzzy probability distribution for a component from several possible distributions by considering particular features that map to the Weibull parameters. The use of fuzzified probabilities in fault trees has been considered by others; once the fuzzy component failure probabilities have been calculated, a fuzzy system reliability distribution can be obtained which portrays the inexact nature of the data on which the result is based.