On conditional residual lifetime and conditional inactivity time of k-out-of-n systems

Abstract

In designing structures of technical systems, the reliability engineers often deal with the reliability analysis of coherent systems. Coherent system has monotone structure function and all components of the system are relevant. This paper considers some particular models of coherent systems having identical components with independent lifetimes. The main purpose of the paper is to study conditional residual lifetime of coherent system, given that at a fixed time certain number of components have failed but still there are some functioning components. Different aging and stochastic properties of variables connected with the conditional residual lifetimes of the coherent systems are obtained. An expression for the parent distribution in terms of conditional mean residual lifetime is provided. The similar result is obtained for the conditional mean inactivity time of the failed components of coherent system. The conditional mean inactivity time of failed components presents an interest in many engineering applications where the reliability of system structure is important for designing and constructing of systems. Some illustrative examples with given particular distributions are also presented. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.