Stochastic comparisons of series-parallel and parallel-series systems with dependence between components and also of subsystems

In this paper, we consider series-parallel and parallel-series systems comprising dependent components that are drawn from a heterogeneous population consisting of $$ m $$ different subpopulations. The components within each subpopulation are assumed to be dependent, and the subsystems themselves are also dependent, with their joint distribution being modeled by an Archimedean copula. We consider a very general setting in which we assume that …