Importance Measures in Reliability, Risk, and Optimization

This unique treatment systematically interprets a spectrum of importance measures to provide a comprehensive overview of their applications in the areas of reliability, network, risk, mathematical programming, and optimization. Investigating the precise relationships among various importance measures, it describes how they are modelled and combined with other design tools to allow users to solve readily many real-world, large-scale decision-making problems. 

Presenting the state-of-the-art in network analysis, multistate systems, and application in modern systems, this book offers a clear and complete introduction to the topic. Through describing the reliability importance and the fundamentals, it covers advanced topics such as signature of coherent systems, multi-linear functions, and new interpretation of the mathematical programming problems.

Key highlights:

• Generalizes the concepts behind importance measures (such as sensitivity and perturbation analysis, uncertainty analysis, mathematical programming, network designs), enabling  readers to address large-scale problems within various fields effectively
• Covers a large range of importance measures, including those in binary coherent systems, binary monotone systems, multistate systems, continuum systems, repairable systems, as well as importance measures of pairs and groups of components
• Demonstrates numerical and practical applications of importance measures and the related methodologies, including risk analysis in nuclear power plants, cloud computing, software reliability and more
• Provides thorough comparisons, examples and case studies on relations of different importance measures, with conclusive results based on the authors’ own research
• Describes reliability design such as redundancy allocation, system upgrading and component assignment.

This book will benefit researchers and practitioners interested in systems design, reliability, risk and optimization, statistics, maintenance, prognostics and operations. Readers can develop feasible approaches to solving various open-ended problems in their research and practical work. Software developers, IT analysts and reliability and safety engineers in nuclear, telecommunications, offshore and civil industries will also find the book useful.

Professor Way Kuo, City University of Hong Kong
Professor Kuo is President and Distinguished Professor of City University of Hong Kong. He served as Distinguished Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of Tennessee between 2003 and 2008, and between 2000 and 2003 he held the Wisenbaker Chair of Engineering in Innovation and was the Executive Associate Dean of Engineering at Texas A&M University. Professor Kuo is recipient of the IEEE Reliability Society Lifetime Achievement Award, and now serves as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Reliability. He has co-authored six textbooks and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, Academia Sinica (Taiwan), ad International Academy for Quality. He is a fellow of ASQ, ASA, IEEE, INFORMS and IIE.

Professor Xiaoyan Zhu, University of Tennessee, USA
Professor Zhu is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Information Engineering at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has taught both undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematical programming and operations research, for example Operations Research I (Linear Programming), Inventory Control, Production Planning, and Advanced Nonlinear Programming. Professor Zhu has published several papers related to importance measures, and she is a member of INFORMS, IIE, and IEEE.