The subsignatures of a system with continuous and exchangeable component lifetimes form a class of indexes ranging from the Samaniego signature to the Barlow–Proschan importance index. These indexes can be computed through explicit linear expressions involving the values of the structure...

For a system with i.i.d. component lifetimes the Samaniego signature can be computed for instance from Boland’s formula, which requires the knowledge of every value of the associated structure function. We show how the signature can be computed more efficiently from the diagonal section of the...