RELIABILITY EVALUATION OF PROCESS MODELS

The integration definition (IDEF) methodology has been extensively use d for modeling of various processes, Reliability analysis of IDEF3 mod els is of interest to practitioners and researchers for several reason s, It identifies critical activities in the process, improves the proc ess performance, and decreases downtime and operating cost of the proc ess. This paper extends the system reliability evaluation techniques, i.e., the system reduction approach and minimum path and cut sets meth od for reliability evaluation of IDEF3 models. Representation of IDEF3 models as reliability graphs, generation of the minimal path and cut sets of IDEF3 models with a path tree algorithm, and reliability analy sis of IDEF3 models are the issues discussed in this paper, An algorit hm for computing reliability of an IDEF3 model from a path act-activit y incidence matrix is also presented.