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Reliability Estimation of Series-Parallel Systems Using Component Failure Data  

Kim, Kyung-Mee O. (Department of Industrial Engineering, Konkuk University)
Publication Information
IE interfaces / v.22, no.3, 2009 , pp. 214-222 More about this Journal
Abstract
In the early design stage, system reliability must be estimated from life testing data at the component level. Previously, a point estimate of system reliability was obtained from the unbiased estimate of the component reliability after assuming that the number of failed components for a given time followed a binomial distribution. For deriving the confidence interval of system reliability, either the lognormal distribution or the normal approximation of the binomial distribution was assumed for the estimator of system reliability. In this paper, a new estimator is used for the component level reliability, which is biased but has a smaller mean square error than the previous one. We propose to use the beta distribution rather than the lognormal or approximated normal distribution for developing the confidence interval of the system reliability. A numerical example based on Monte Carlo simulation illustrates advantages of the proposed approach over the previous approach.
Keywords
unbiased estimator; mean square error; confidence interval;
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