Credible improvement potential index for reliability importance assessment

System reliability represents a key performance of modern products and nowadays being reliable is one of the most important requirements, in particular in the industrial field. This paper is focused on the reliability improvement of complex systems containing redundant architectures through Reliability Importance (RI): starting from the single component reliability, RI procedures are used to evaluate their impact on the whole system. This practice is particularly helpful during the design stage of complex systems since it allows design engineers to have reliability feedbacks before the realization of the product in order to focus the efforts on the components that have the greatest effect on the whole reliability performance. The paper is organized as follows: the first section describes the Credible Improvement Potential (CIP) that is the most suitable RI metric for our purpose. The second section, instead, shows the application of the method on a generic complex system containing standby redundant blocks.