Estimation of reliability characteristics of general system configuration

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider a General System Configuration (GSC), whose particular cases are all the popular system configurations. In reliability engineering one comes across various system configurations, for example, series, parallel and k‐out of‐m system models, which consist of a number of components. Design/methodology/approach – The paper gives a general approach to express the reliability properties of the whole system in terms of component parameters. The reliability of a GSC is expressed as a polynomial of the component reliability. Lifetime data on components have been used to estimate the system reliability characteristics through classical and Bayes estimation procedures. Findings – The paper finds that the underlying distribution is assumed to be Weibull and, in view of cost constraints, Type‐II censored information has been used. Practical implications – The paper is useful for reliability practitioners as well as theoreticians. It provides an easy method to estimate the reliability of any system configuration. Originality/value – Three types of estimation procedures for a general system configuration have been developed for the first time. The lifetimes of components are assumed to follow widely used Weibull distribution, whose particular case is the most popular exponential distribution.