Estimation of system reliability for independent series components with Weibull life distributions

The reliability of a series system with independent components is estimated based on random samples from Weibull failure distributions with parameters theta /sub i/ and beta /sub i/. It is assumed that the beta /sub i/'s are known, which reduces the reliability of the system to a function, gamma g( theta ), of theta =( theta /sub 1/, . . ., theta /sub p/). An estimate of gamma ( theta ) which is better than the MVUE of gamma ( theta ) in terms of mean square error is determined. The predicted reliability and the percentage improvement for this estimator is computed and compared with the usual MVUE of gamma ( theta ). The predicted reliability using the improved estimator is numerically closer to the true system reliability.<
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