On the formalization of importance measures using HOL theorem proving

Abstract

Importance measures provide a systematic approach to scrutinize critical system components, which are extremely beneficial in making important decisions, such as prioritizing reliability improvement activities, identifying weak-links and effective usage of given resources. The importance measures are then in turn used to obtain a criticality value for each system component and to rank the components in descending manner. Simulations tools are generally used to perform importance measure based analysis, but they require expensive computations and thus they are not suitable for large systems. A more scalable approach is to utilize the importance measures to obtain all the necessary conditions by proving a generic relationship describing the relative importance between any pair of components in a system. In this paper, we propose to use higher-order-logic (HOL) theorem proving to verify such relationships and thus making sure that all the essential conditions are accompanied by the proven property. In particular, we formalize the commonly used importance measures, such as Birnbaum and Fussell-Vesely, and conduct a formal importance measure analysis of a railway signaling system at a Moroccan level crossing as an application for illustration purpose.