Abstract
The paper provides justification for the necessity to define reliability of diagnosing systems (SDG) in order to develop a diagnosis on state of any technical mechanism being a diagnosed system (SDN). It has been shown that the knowledge of SDG reliability enables defining diagnosis reliability. It has been assumed that the diagnosis reliability can be defined as a diagnosis property which specifies the degree of recognizing by a diagnosing system (SDG) the actual state of the diagnosed system (SDN) which may be any mechanism, and the conditional probability p(S*/K*) of occurrence (existence) of state S* of the mechanism (SDN) as a diagnosis measure provided that at a specified reliability of SDG, the vector K* of values of diagnostic parameters implied by the state, is observed. The probability that SDG is in the state of ability during diagnostic tests and the following diagnostic inferences leading to development of a diagnosis about the SDN state, has been accepted as a measure of SDG reliability. The theory of semi-Markov processes has been used for defining the SDG reliability, that enabled to develop a SDG reliability model in the form of a seven-state (continuous-time discrete-state) semi-Markov process of changes of SDG states.