The structure signature of a system made up of $n$ components having continuous and i.i.d. lifetimes was defined in the eighties by Samaniego as the $n$-tuple whose $k$-th coordinate is the probability that the $k$-th component failure causes the system to fail. More recently, a bivariate version of this concept was considered as follows. The joint structure signature of a pair of systems built on a common set of components having continuous and i.i.d. lifetimes is a square matrix of order $n$ whose $(k,l)$-entry is the probability that the $k$-th failure causes the first system to fail and the $l$-th failure causes the second system to fail. This concept was successfully used to derive a signature-based decomposition of the joint reliability of the two systems. In the first part of this paper we provide an explicit formula to compute the joint structure signature of two or more systems and extend this formula to the general non-i.i.d. case, assuming only that the distribution of the component lifetimes has no ties. We also provide and discuss a necessary and sufficient condition on this distribution for the joint reliability of the systems to have a signature-based decomposition. In the second part of this paper we show how our results can be efficiently applied to the investigation of the reliability and signature of multistate systems made up of two-state components. The key observation is that the structure function of such a multistate system can always be additively decomposed into a sum of classical structure functions. Considering a multistate system then reduces to considering simultaneously several two-state systems

The Banzhaf power index was introduced in cooperative game theory to measure the real power of players in a game. The Banzhaf interaction index was then proposed to measure the interaction degree inside coalitions of players. It was shown that the power and interaction indexes can be obtained as solutions of a standard least squares approximation problem for pseudo-Boolean functions. Considering certain weighted versions of this approximation problem, we define a class of weighted interaction indexes that generalize the Banzhaf interaction index. We show that these indexes define a subclass of the family of probabilistic interaction indexes and study their most important properties. Finally, we give an interpretation of the Banzhaf and Shapley interaction indexes as centers of mass of this subclass of interaction indexes

Using combinatorial methods, we derive several formulas for the volume of convex bodies obtained by intersecting a unit hypercube with a halfspace, or with a hyperplane of codimension 1, or with a flat defined by two parallel hyperplanes. We also describe some of the history of these problems, dating to Polya’s Ph.D. thesis, and we discuss several applications of these formulas.

We provide a complete classification of the n-ary semigroup structures defined by polynomial functions over infinite commutative integral domains with identity, thus generalizing Głazek and Gleichgewicht’s classification of the corresponding ternary semigroups.

The associativity property, usually defined for binary functions, can be generalized to functions of a given fixed arity n ⩾ 1 as well as to functions of multiple arities. In this paper, we investigate these two generalizations in the case of polynomial functions over bounded distributive lattices and present explicit descriptions of the corresponding associative functions. We also show that, in this case, both generalizations of associativity are essentially the same.