For a coherent system the Barlow–Proschan importance index, defined when the component lifetimes are independent, measures the probability that the failure of a given component causes the system to fail. Iyer (1992) [3] extended this concept to the more general case when the component...

We introduce the concept of subsignature for semicoherent systems as a class of indexes that range from the system signature to the Barlow–Proschan importance index. Specifically, given a nonempty subset M of the set of components of a system, we define the M-signature of the system as the...

The concept of signature was introduced by Samaniego for systems whose components have i.i.d. lifetimes. This concept proved to be useful in the analysis of theoretical behaviors of systems. In particular, it provides an interesting signature-based representation of the system reliability in...

Considering a semicoherent system made up of n components having i.i.d. continuous lifetimes, Samaniego defined its structural signature as the n-tuple whose kth coordinate is the probability that the kth component failure causes the system to fail. This n-tuple, which depends only on the...

The concept of system signature was introduced by Samaniego for systems whose components have i.i.d. lifetimes. We consider its extension to the continuous dependent case and give an explicit expression for this extension as a difference of weighted means of the structure function values. We...