Reliability analysis of semicoherent systems through their lattice polynomial descriptions

A semicoherent system can be described by its structure function or, equivalently, by a lattice polynomial function expressing the system lifetime in terms of the component lifetimes. In this paper we point out the parallelism between the two descriptions and use the natural connection of lattice polynomial functions and relevant random events to collect exact formulas for the system reliability. We also discuss the equivalence between calculating the reliability of semicoherent systems and calculating the distribution function of a lattice polynomial function of random variables.