Comparisons of Multi-State Systems with Binary Components of Different Sizes

The system signatures of multi-state coherent or mixed systems with i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) binary-state components are considered in this paper. For any multi-state coherent or mixed system with m i.i.d. components, the signature of its equivalent system of size m + l can be written as a mixture of signatures of several multi-state vector k -out-of- m + l: F systems. This facilitates the comparison of two multi-state …