Abstract
Resilience of systems to failures during functioning is of great practical importance. One of the strategies that might be considered to enhance reliability and resilience of a system is swapping components when a component fails, thus replacing it by another component from the system that is still functioning. This paper studies this scenario, particularly with the use of the survival signature to quantify system reliability, where it is assumed that such a swap of components requires these components to be of the same type. We examine the effect of swapping components on a reliability importance measure for the specific components, and we also consider the joint reliability importance of two components. Such swapping of components may be an attractive means toward more resilient systems and could be an alternative to adding more components to achieve redundancy of repair and replacement activities.