Purpose – The purpose of this article is to determine if there is a linkage between the army material systems analysis activity (AMSAA) reliability growth models at the system and subsystem levels and at the subsystem and functional levels of indenture. If such a linkage exists, how this...

Historically, reliability of systems has been tracked based on a common assumption that, at the system level, the failure rate follows the exponential distribution, and is therefore assumed to be constant over the useful life of the system. However, this method, while adequate for many purposes,...