Research by Associate Prof. Gaofeng Da that proposes a novel and efficient algorithm to computing the system signature was featured in IISE Transactions on March 2018. As the flagship journal of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, IISE Transactions publishes original high-quality papers on a wide range of topics of interest to industrial engineers who want to remain current with the state-of-the-art technologies. The refereed journal aims to foster the engineering community by publishing papers with a strong methodological focus motivated by real problems that impact engineering practice and research. “Our algorithm is intuitive, straightforward and particularly efficient to compute signature when the number of components is very large”, the authors noted. Abstract is copied below.

Computing the system signature has been an attractive but challenging problem in system reliability. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to compute the signature of a system with exchangeable components. This new algorithm relies only on the information of minimal cuts sets or minimal path sets, which is very intuitive and efficient. The new results in this paper are used to address the problem of the ageing property of the system signature in the literature. We further discuss the bounds for the system signature when only partial information is available. The application of these new results to cyberattacks is also highlighted.
   

 
Read the paper “An efficient algorithm for computing the signatures of systems with exchangeable components and applications” (by Gaofeng Da, M. Xu and P. S. Chan) V50, p584-595, IISE Trans.