Imprecise reliability for some new lifetime distribution classes

Abstract

To develop a general reliability theory, taking into account various sources of information and a lack of satisfactory data on which estimates of system parameters can be based, the theory of coherent imprecise probabilities can be used. The purpose of the paper is to study the reliability of systems based on coherent imprecise probability models, taking into account the ageing aspect of the lifetime distributions, independence of system components, and a lack of satisfactory data. We use some new non-parametric life distribution classes which generalize the well-known increasing and decreasing failure rate distributions and can represent various judgements related to lifetime distributions. In this paper we apply the theory of coherent imprecise probabilities to reliability analysis of monotone systems.