Technical Note—An Importance Ranking for System Components Based upon Cuts

Measures and rankings of a system's components relative to their importance to the system reliability have been developed by a number of authors to aid in the identification of those components on which to concentrate the resources for reliability improvement. This note proposes a new definition of component importance that is based upon minimal cuts and compares it with earlier definitions. We conclude that the new definition has distinct advantages when the system is composed of highly reliable components.