THEORY OF MAINTAINED SYSTEMS:DISTRIBUTION OF TIME TO FIRST SYSTEM FAILURE

摘要

The distribution of time to first system failure is considered for systems whose repairable components are separately maintained. It is shown that if repairable components have exponential failure law while repair distributions have decreasing repair rate, then the distribution of time to first system failure is NBU (for new better than used). This result is used to provide useful bounds on the system failure distribution. Improved bounds for the exponential repair case are given.