  This paper develops computable metrics to assign priorities for information
collection on network systems made up by binary components. Components are
worth inspecting because their condition state is uncertain and the system
functioning depends on it. The Value of Information (VoI) allows assessing the
impact of information in decision making under uncertainty, including the
precision of the observation, the available actions and the expected economic
loss. Some VoI-based metrics for system-level and component-level maintenance
actions, defined as "global" and "local" metrics, respectively, are introduced,
analyzed and applied to series and parallel systems. Their computationally
complexity of applications to general networks is discussed and, to tame the
complexity for the local metric assessment, a heuristic is presented and its
performance is compared on some case studies.
