The basic notion of a coherent system has been defined and illustrated in the preceding chapter, and various properties and tools have been established to assist in the study of such systems. Structure functions are admittedly quite revealing. They are in one-to-one correspondence with the coherent systems themselves and provide a way of indexing systems and also of comparing them. Also, they are unambiguous summaries of a system’s design, and are more useful summaries than schematic diagrams or flow charts, which often look different but may correspond to one and the same system. We must, however, acknowledge that the artillery we have discussed thus far has some limitations. Since the number of coherent systems of order n grows exponentially with n, the indexing of systems through their structure functions tends to be of limited use in problems involving comparisons or optimization among systems. Structure functions are complex algebraic expressions that, in general, admit to multiple equivalent representations.
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(2007). System Signatures. In: System Signatures and their Applications in Engineering Reliability. International Series In Operations Research & Management Science, vol 110. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-71797-5_3
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