Cost-related importance measure

This paper introduces a new importance measure, the cost-related importance measure (CIM), for system cost-risk analysis. CIM responds to the need of the analyst to get information about the importance of proposed changes that affect component properties and multiple basic events. Different from other basic importance measures, the proposed CIM takes into account cost issue, which can consider both structure importance and cost-efficiency importance. CIM is additive, which means the groups of basic events or parameters are the sum of the individual CIMs. We discuss the relationship between CIM and other basic importance measures, and find out that the differential importance measure (DIM) is the special case of CIM when taking certain cost function. Two examples are used to demonstrate the evaluation of CIM at both the basic event and the parameter level. And in the second example, we discuss the method for dealing with the ignored basic event.