THE USE OF IMPRECISE COMPONENT RELIABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS IN RELIABILITY CALCULATIONS

System-reliability prediction can be needed when detailed data concern ing each component are unavailable. This prevents data from various so urces from being integrated by considering each source as a sample fro m the same population. For the Weibull distribution, fuzzy arithmetic is used to synthesize a single fuzzy probability distribution for a co mponent from several possible distributions by considering particular features that map to the Weibull parameters. The use of fuzzified prob abilities in fault trees has been considered by others; once the fuzzy component failure probabilities have been calculated, a fuzzy system- reliability distribution can be obtained which portrays the inexact na ture of the data on which the result is based.