A Shock Model Based Approach to Network Reliability

We consider a network consisting of n components and assume that the network has two states up and down. We further suppose that the network is subject to shocks that appear according to a counting process and that each shock may lead to the component failures. Under some assumptions on the shock occurrences, we present a new variant of the notion of signature which we call t-signature. Then, t-signature-based mixture representations for the reliability function of the network are obtained. Several stochastic properties of the network lifetime are investigated. In particular, under the assumption that the number of failures at each shock follows a binomial distribution and the process of shocks is nonhomogeneous Poisson process, explicit form of the network reliability is derived and its aging properties are explored. Several examples are also provided.