Application of Multi-valued Decision Diagrams in Computing the Direct Partial Logic Derivatives

Multi-State Systems (MSSs) are mathematical models often used in reliability engineering since allow a rather detailed evaluation of system reliability. These models represent the system reliability/availability behavior from the perfect functioning to the fault, but allow to distinguish several intermediate states. The calculation of related reliability measures can be performed in terms of Direct Partial Logic Derivatives (DPLDs). A drawback of this approach is high dimensionality of MSSs. To overcome this problem, we propose to use Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MDDs) as a data structure to represent multi-state systems and perform computations of reliability measures in terms of DPLDs.