ANALYSIS OF POSTERIOR AVAILABILITY DISTRIBUTIONS OF SERIES AND PARALLEL SYSTEMS

The lifetime distribution of an engineering system is a powerful tool for analysing the system in respect of its reliability characteristics . The analysis can be improved if the experimenter has, and is able to combine, the prior belief about the system with the operational or ex perimental data. Moreover, in many situations, the operational data wi th the complete system may either be costlier or non-existent. The pro blem can still be tackled by making use of such information available on the subunits or components of the system. Pursuing these concepts, the present study deals with the analysis of posterior availability di stributions for a series and a parallel system. Time truncated failure and repair information and prior beliefs about the failure and repair rates of the components of the systems have been employed in the anal ysis.