A brief overview of the integrated importance measure

Importance measures in reliability engineering are used to identify weak components and/or states in contributing to the reliable functioning of a system. Traditionally, importance measures do not consider the possible effect of transition rates among different component states, which, however, has great effect on the component probability distribution and should therefore be taken into consideration. This paper reviews the integrated importance measure (IIM). IIM evaluates how the transition of component states affects the system performance. IIM is a good measure for engineers to determine that in which state it is most worthy to keep the component to provide the desired level of system performance, and which component is the most important to keep in some state and above for improving the performance of the system.