A more general reliability allocation method using the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set and minimal variance OWGA weights

Reliability allocation is one of the most critical tasks in system reliability design, the result of which directly influences a product's quality and the robustness of the system. Traditionally, reliability allocation has used the feasibility-of-objectives (FOO) method to perform system reliability allocation at the beginning of the product design stage. However, the FOO method has several shortcomings; for example, it requires that the value of the reliability allocation factors be single linguistic variables, and it does not consider the ordered weight of the reliability allocation factors. To solve this issue, this paper integrates the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets and minimal variance OWGA weights to effect flexible allocation of system reliability. To verify the efficacy of the proposed approach, an example of reliability allocation in a transceiver system is provided to illustrate its application, and the results of this method are compared with those of the FOO and fuzzy allocation methods. We conclude that the proposed approach is more accurate and performs flexible allocation of system reliability. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.