Importance Analysis of Groundwater Remediation Systems

This paper aims to investigate the importance levels of the components in two groundwater remediation systems and examine the impact of each component on the whole system. Four measures are introduced including structural importance (SI), Birnbaum importance (BI), criticality importance (CI), and modification importance (MI). In the first system, four measures are simply applied on the components importance analysis. In the second one, operational time, components number and component position changes are considered. It is found that different measures may lead to variations in importance levels even for the same system mainly due to the definitions and algorithms of the measures; importance level would be reduced with the increase in the number of the identical components used in parallel. In general, SI just depends on system structure, BI and CI are not significantly affected by failure rate except when the component and the changing component are in the same part, and MI is sensitive to modification of failure. The information obtained through importance analysis can effectively support design of groundwater remediation systems by pre-checking the reasonability of factors such as operational time, number of components, and configuration of components. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014