A bivariate load-sharing model.

Abstract

The motivation of this work came from a data set obtained from an experiment performed on diabetic patients, with diabetic retinopathy disorder. The aim of this experiment is to test whether there is any significant difference between two different treatments which are being used for this disease. The two eyes can be considered as a two-component load-sharing system. In a two-component load-sharing system after the failure of one component, the surviving component has to shoulder extra load. Hence, it is prone to failure at an earlier time than what is expected under the original model. It may also happen sometimes that the failure of one component may release extra resources to the survivor, thus delaying the failure. In most of the existing literature, it has been assumed that at the beginning the lifetime distributions of the two components are independently distributed, which may not be very reasonable in this case. In this paper, we have introduced a new bivariate load-sharing model where the independence assumptions of the lifetime distributions of the two components at the beginning have been relaxed. In this present model, they may be dependent. Further, there is a positive probability that the two components may fail simultaneously. If the two components do not fail simultaneously, it is assumed that the lifetime of the surviving component changes based on the tampered failure rate assumption. The proposed bivariate distribution has a singular component. The likelihood inference of the unknown parameters has been provided. Simulation results and the analysis of the data set have been presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed model.