A sensitivity analysis for the adequacy assessment of a multi-state physics modeling approach for reliability analysis

In this work, a moment-independent Sensitivity Analysis (SA) based on Hellinger distance and Kullback-Leibler divergence is proposed to identify the component of a system most affecting its reliability (Diaconis et al., 1982; Gibbs et al., 2002; Di Maio et al., 2014). This result is used to adequately allocate modeling efforts on the most important component that, therefore, deserves a component-level Multi-State Physics Modeling (MSPM) to be integrated into a system-level model, to estimate the system failure probability.