A Sequential Testing Procedure for a System's State Identification

The system and its components have only two states: complete success or complete failure. The components' states are random variables and the system's state depends deterministically on the states of its elements. This paper assumes the state of the system is unknown and presents a sequential testing procedure of the components in order to determine the system's state. The procedure minimizes the expected number of necessary tests for a wide class of systems. The procedure is needed when the system is entirely or partially consumed upon its use, e.g., the firing of a missile, and one wishes to know the system's state without actually operating the system.