A Bayesian Estimation of the Reliability of Coherent Structures

Abstract

We develop a procedure for estimating the reliability of a coherent structure of independent components when a prior distribution is assigned to the reliability of the structure function and when failure data on either the structure, its components, or on both are available. We generalize our results by obtaining bounds on the moments of the posterior distribution of the reliability of the structure when its components are associated. We illustrate our procedures by simple examples.