On the effect of redundancy for systems with dependent components

Abstract

Parallel redundancy is a common approach to increase system reliability and mean time to failure. When studying systems with redundant components, it is usually assumed that the components are independent; however, this assumption is seldom valid in practice. In the case of dependent components, the effectiveness of adding a component may be quite different from the case of independent components. In this paper we investigate how the degree of correlation affects the increase in the mean lifetime for parallel redundancy when the two components are positively quadrant dependent. A number of bivariate distributions that can be used in the modeling of dependent components are compared. Various bounds are also derived. The results are useful in reliability analysis as well as for designers who are required to take into account the possible dependence among the components.