Applications of Signatures in Reliability Economics

It is difficult to give a succinct description of the field of Reliability Economics. At present, the field might be thought of as a somewhat scattered collection of results in which a decision is made or an action is taken with a view toward balancing the natural tension that exists between the performance of a system and its cost. In assessing the performance characteristics of a particular system design, for instance, one’s goal would be to identify a system whose performance is good but whose cost is modest. Three imposing challenges immediately arise in seeking to address a problem in Reliability Economics analytically. One must begin by identifying a reasonable way of quantifying the performance of each system under consideration (perhaps all possible systems of a given size).