Bayesian Inference of System Reliability for Multicomponent Stress-Strength Model under Marshall-Olkin Weibull Distribution

Abstract

Industrial systems often have redundant structures for improving reliability and avoiding sudden failures, and a parallel system is one of the special redundant systems. In this paper, we consider the problem of reliability estimation for a parallel system when one stress variable is involved, which is called the multicomponent stress-strength model. The parallel system contains two components, and their joint lifetime follows a Marshall–Olkin bivariate Weibull distribution, while the stress variable is assumed to be the Weibull distribution. Due to the complicated form of the likelihood function, a data augmentation method is proposed, and then the Gibbs sampling algorithm is constructed to obtain the Bayesian estimation of the system reliability. The proposed method is evaluated by a simulated dataset and Monte Carlo simulation study. The simulation results show that the proposed method performs well in terms of relative bias, mean squared error and frequentist coverage probability.

Keywords

• stress-strength model
• Marshall–Olkin bivariate Weibull distribution
• Bayesian inference
• Gibbs sampling