Abstract
Central to the modeling and computation of the reliability of systems is the reliability block diagram (RBD). The RBD illustrates the system reliability as a function of the reliability of the components of the system. The RBD gives the design engineer information on which combinations of system components must be healthy and fault-free for the system to be operational. Also, given the individual component reliabilities, one can derive the overall system reliability from the RBD. While reliability computational methods are available to manually derive the reliabilities of systems, it is essential to have automated methods for reliability computation. This paper presents RELCOMP, a software tool which, when given the RBD of a system, computes the overall system reliability as a function of the individual component reliabilities. The program is written in Franz Lisp and is based on the algorithm described by Bennetts.
1 It uses AI techniques such as pattern matching and Boolean techniques such as reduction by absorption.