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Reliability Estimation Based On System Data With An Unknown Load Share Rule, Hyoungtae Kim, Paul H. Kvam

Department of Math & Statistics Faculty Publications

We consider a multicomponent load-sharing system in which the failure rate of a given component depends on the set of working components at any given time. Such systems can arise in software reliability models and in multivariate failure-time models in biostatistics, for example. A load-share rule dictates how stress or load is redistributed to the surviving components after a component fails within the system. In this paper, we assume the load share rule is unknown and derive methods for statistical inference on load-share parameters based on maximum likelihood. Components with (individual) constant failure rates are observed in two environments: (1) …