Redundancy and robustness of systems of events

The article aims to add a new impetus to rational and objective probabilistic evaluation of redundancy and robustness, based on uncertainties of systems and subsystems of events. An attempt is made to demonstrate the relevance of intuitive comprehension of redundancy and robustness of engineering systems of events. An event-oriented system analysis of a number of random observable operational and failure modes, with adverse probability distributions in a lifetime, may provide a deeper understanding of systems operational abundance and endurance. The system uncertainty analysis is based on the concept of entropy as defined in information theory and applied to probability theory. The article relates reliability, uncertainty, redundancy and robustness of systems of events and their application is illustrated in numerical examples. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.