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The Increasing Failure Rate Property of Consecutive-k:-out-of-n Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

Lirong Cui
Affiliation:
Statistics & OR Group, European Business Management School, University College of Swansea, Swansea SA2 8PP, United Kingdom
Alan G. Hawkes
Affiliation:
Statistics & OR Group, European Business Management School, University College of Swansea, Swansea SA2 8PP, United Kingdom
Assad Jalali
Affiliation:
Statistics & OR Group, European Business Management School, University College of Swansea, Swansea SA2 8PP, United Kingdom

Abstract

We prove Hwang and Yao's conjecture about failure of consecutive-k-out-of-n systems whose components have independent and identically distributed increasing failure rate (IFR) lifetimes, namely, that for each k ≥ 2 there exists nk such that for every nnk the system does not preserve IFR. For the cases k = 4 and 5, we present complete solutions. We present further conjectures.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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