A New Method for Approximating the Failure Rate of a System

SUMMARY & CONCLUSIONSThis paper proposes a new approach to computing the failure rate of a system. The key idea is to efficiently approximate the derivative of the reliability of system that appears in the computation. In general, we cannot find an accurate approximation of the derivative of a function even one exists for the function itself. However, we can guarantee the accuracy of the approximation of the derivative of the system reliability with respect to those of the components by using the fact that the system reliability and its approximation can be expressed in the form of a multilinear polynomial.