Role of mission criticality and component reliability in defining and evaluating system effectiveness

Abstract

We present a framework that not only links system survival to survival rates of system components but also to the degree to which these components contribute to the system's ability to achieve a mission. In the framework a system is made up of multiple, possibly heterogeneous, components, each having a known probability of failure. The overall measure of system effectiveness is then a function of component reliability probabilities and mission criticality. In this approach the interdependency of component reliability and mission criticality is adequately modelled, which when ignored can lead to incorrect assessments of system performance.