Uncertainty of Integral System Safety in Enginering

Abstract

The probabilistic safety analysis evaluates system reliability and failure probability by using statistics and probability theory but it cannot estimate the system uncertainties due to variabilities of system state probabilities. The article firstly resumes how the information entropy expresses the probabilistic uncertainties due to unevenness of probability distributions of system states. Next it argues that the conditional entropy with respect to system operational and failure states appropriately describes system redundancy and robustness, respectively. Finally the article concludes that the joint probabilistic uncertainties of reliability, redundancy and robustness defines the integral system safety. The concept of integral system safety allows more comprehensive definitions of favorable system functional properties, configuration evaluation, optimization and decision making in engineering.