Generalizing the survival signature to unrepairable homogeneous multi-state systems
将二元系统的生存签名概念推广到一类不可修复的齐次多状态系统，得到系统在特定状态或以上停留时间的生存函数表示，并以三性能水平的多状态连续k-out-of-n系统为例说明。
The notion of signature has been widely applied for the reliability evaluation of technical systems that consist of binary components. Multi-state system modeling is also widely used for representing real life engineering systems whose components can have different performance levels. In this article, the concept of survival signature is generalized to a certain class of unrepairable homogeneous multi-state systems with multi-state components. With such a generalization, a representation for the survival function of the time spent by a system in a specific state or above is obtained. The findings of the article are illustrated for multi-state consecutive-k-out-of-n system which perform its task at three different performance levels. The generalization of the concept of survival signature to a multi-state system with multiple types of components is also presented. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 63: 593–599, 2017