Claudio M. Rocco S.

Importance Measures (IMs) are valuable tools that have been used to quantify and rank the components of a system with respect to their contribution to a considered measure of performance. For example, IMs have been used for characterizing the importance of element failures with respect to the overall system reliability. In general, different IMs based on different definitions may lead to different importance rankings of the components within a system. This fact could affect a decision-maker for achieving, for example, a better global performance level. In this paper we propose the use of the Hasse Diagram Technique (HDT) to make a preliminary assessment for detecting possible conflicts among IM and selecting, if required, a convenient combination or aggregation of IMs, based on parametric or non-parametric techniques, such as Ordered Weighted Average (OWA) or Copeland Score (CS). Numerical examples illustrate the assessment. Keywords: Copeland Score, Hasse Diagram Technique, Importance Measures, Multi-Criteria Decision, Ordered Weighted Average (OWA).