ABSTRACT
System reliability is the probability that a system will function correctly throughout the mission period. Thus, reliability is a decreasing function of time. This chapter aims to define a system as an integrated collection of subsystems, modules or components, which function together to attain specific results. It discusses the connection between the reliability of components of a system and that of the system as a whole. The chapter focuses on the relatively simpler cases of systems with independent components’ time till failure, and simple coherent structure functions, like those of series, parallel, and crosslinked. It shows how the bootstrapping procedure of sampling resampling can be applied to obtain bootstrapping estimates of the standard-error of the maximum likelihood estimators. The chapter examines the problem of detecting a shift to the wear-out phase of components and a problem of detecting a shift from the phase of “infant mortality” to the mature phase of a system.
