In this paper we describe a model for survival functions. Under this model a system is subject to shocks governed by a Poisson process. Each shock to the system causes a random damage that grows in time. Damages accumulate additively and the system fails if the total damage exceeds a certain capacity or threshold. Various properties of this model are obtained. Sufficient conditions are derived for the failure rate (FR) order and the stochastic order to hold between the random lifetimes of two systems whose failures can be described by our proposed model.

Two devices are subjected to common shocks arriving according to two identical counting processes. Let and denote the probability of surviving k shocks for the first and the second device, respectively. We find conditions on the discrete distributions and in order to obtain the failure rate order (FR), the likelihood ratio order (LR) and the mean residual order (MR) between the random lifetimes of the two devices. We also obtain sufficient conditions under which the above mentioned relations between the discrete distributions are verified in some cumulative damage shock models.