On the joint signature of several coherent systems with some shared components

The concept of joint signature (JS), introduced by Navarro, Samaniego, and Balakrishnan (2010), is a useful tool for investigating the joint reliability of two coherent systems with shared components. In this article, by considering several coherent systems which share some components, with independent and identically distributed lifetimes, we obtain a pseudo-mixture representation for the joint distribution of the systems lifetimes based on a general notion of joint signature which is referred to as generalized joint signature (GJS). It is shown how the GJS is separated from the effect of the components’ lifetime distribution and this relationship helps us to represent the GJS as a two-dimensional matrix instead of a high-dimensional one. Based on the GJS, some ordering results are obtained for comparing two clusters of coherent systems with some shared components. Several examples are provided to illustrate the results established here.