Some Perspectives to Define and Model Reliability Using Fuzzy Sets

This article proposes a new framework to model the reliability for a component or system using the theory and methods of fuzzy sets. We propose to use a substitute or performance variable that is well understood by the customer to fuzzify the states of a component or system. We show that the proposed measures based on fuzzy thinking are more meaningful and customer-centric for reliability-related decision-making processes. The proposed fuzzy reliability measures are a generalization for the traditional binary and multistate reliability and can be used as an alternative for modeling the continuous-state behavior for systems that degrade over time.