COMPETING RISKS ON COHERENT RELIABILITY SYSTEMS - ESTIMATION IN THE PARAMETRIC CASE

A coherent reliability system is a machine composed of a number of com ponents that fails as soon as the set of failed components reaches cer tain fatal set-thresholds. On failure of the machine, an autopsy repor t reveals its time of failure and the set of failed components. I use incomplete data methods to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of para meters characterizing the lifetime distributions of the components, ba sed on a sample of autopsy reports.