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In a multi-state system, either the entire system or its components will have more than two
states. Different kind of multi-state systems have been investigated, such as multi-state series-parallel
systems, multi-state k-out-of-n systems and multi-state linear consecutive-k-out-of-n systems.
Performability analysis is concerned with the calculation of probability distribution of different
system performance levels. In this paper, multi-valued decision diagram (MDD) based approaches are
discussed to conduct the performability analysis of multi-state systems. Examples are provided to
illustrate the use of MDD approaches for three types of multi-state systems, e.g. multi-state seriesparallel systems, multi-state k-out-of-n systems and multi-state linear consecutive-k-out-of-n systems.
The empirical results show that the MDD approaches have lower computational complexity than the
traditional methods in model generation and evaluation.