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Failure rate — a unified approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Larry Lee
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Columbia
W. A. Thompson Jr.
Affiliation:
University of Missouri-Columbia

Abstract

Aging, of biological and mechanical systems, is well described as ‘deterioration of the power to withstand destruction.’ The failure-rate concept is the mathematical way of describing aging. Failure rates have been defined for discrete and continuous time and used extensively, particularly in actuarial science and reliability. This paper assumes an arbitrary scale on which an object encounters stress, and develops a theory of failure rate with respect to ‘stress-time’ in analogy with the discrete- and continuous-time cases.

Type
Short Communications
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 1976 

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