System reliability and sensitivity factors via the MPPSS method

A procedure is presented for obtaining the reliability of series, parallel, and mixed systems. The method, called Most Probable Point System Simulation (MPPSS) is simple, and numerically-based. We do not make any claims of analytic advance. Nevertheless, the procedure is more accurate than current analytically-based bounding methods (e.g. bi-modal) and it is computationally efficient. In addition, the method can be used to obtain system sensitivity factors, that is, the importance of each random variable to the system reliability. The procedure is demonstrated through three example illustrations.