A suggestion of a new measure of importance of system components

AbstractIn this paper we suggest a new measure of the importance of a component in a coherent system and derive some of its properties. The measure is for the case of components not undergoing repair proportional to the expected reduction in the remaining system life-time due to the failure of the component. This measure seems to be a useful guide during the system development phase as to which components should receive the most urgent attention in order to increase the system's expected life-time. The properties of the measure are compared with the ones of a measure suggested by Barlow and Proschan [1]