Dynamic signatures and their use in comparing the reliability of new and used systems

Abstract The signature of a system with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) component lifetimes is a vector whose i th element is the probability that the i th component failure is fatal to the system. System signatures have been found to be quite useful tools in the study and comparison of engineered systems. In this article, the theory of system signatures is extended to versions of signatures applicable in dynamic reliability …