Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
The lifelengths of components of a system are usually dependent due to the common random production and operating environments. In this paper, we introduce a multi-variate pure jump Markov process to describe a large class of damage processes on various system components driven by common environmental shocks, and establish some dependence properties (association) for such a process and its multivariate increment process. These strong association properties describe both spatial dependence and temporal dependence of a multivariate pure jump process, and also provide a vehicle to derive some structural properties of component lifelengths of the systems operating in such an environment. Some bounds for the joint survival functions of component lifelengths are also obtained.
Supported in part by the NSF grant DMI 9812994.