A reliability test-plan for series systems with components having stochastic failure rates

This paper proposes a reliability test plan for a series system, by considering the parameter lambda(j) of the exponential distribution to be a random variable having uniform distribution over [0, theta(j)] j = 1, 2, ..., n. Explicit expressions are obtained for the optimal values of the t(j), when the number of components in the system is 2. The general solution, albeit implicit, has also been obtained when the number of components in a given system is greater than or equal to3. Mathematical programming is used to find the optimal solution and to illustrate it with numerical results