Algorithms and formulas for conversion between system signatures and reliability functions

Jean-Luc Marichal

Published 2013-12-28, updated 2015-07-22Version 2

The concept of signature is a useful tool in the analysis of semicoherent systems with continuous and i.i.d. component lifetimes, especially for the comparison of different system designs and the computation of the system reliability. For such systems, we provide conversion formulas between the signature and the reliability function through the corresponding vector of dominations and we derive efficient algorithms for the computation of any of these concepts from the other. We also show how the signature can be easily computed from the reliability function via basic manipulations such as differentiation, coefficient extraction, and integration.