Construction of a Reliability Structure Function Based on Uncertain Data

Structure function is one of the possible mathematical models of the real systems under study in reliability engineering. The structure function represents the correlation the system performance level and components states. The system performance level is defined from the states of all its components. It means that all possible components states and performance levels must be indicated and reflected in the structure function. Initial data for the analysis of real system is uncertain. New methods to construct a structure function based on initial uncertain data is proposed. Fuzzy decision trees (FDTs) are used in this method to transform initial uncertain data about a real system into an exact-defined a system structure function. The proposed method includes three principal steps for the structure function construction: 1) collection of data in the repository; 2) representation of the system model in the form of an FDT; and 3) construction of the structure function based on the FDT.