Polarization and depolarization of monomial ideals with application to multistate system reliability

We study the family of depolarizations of a squarefree monomial ideal $I$, i.e. all monomial ideals whose polarization is $I$. We describe a method to find all depolarizations of $I$ and study some of the properties they share and some they do not share. We then apply polarization and depolarization tools to study the reliability of multi-state coherent systems via binary systems and vice versa.