Estimation of parameters for a system equipped with protection block

Abstract

This paper studies the problem of estimating unknown parameters involved in a system which is equipped with a protection block. The system has different failure rates depending on whether the protection block is present or not, as the protection block is modeled by its own lifetime distribution and contributes an additional failure component to the system. The model is analyzed under the assumption of exponentially distributed lifetimes, leading to the study of its distributional properties and the estimation problem for its unknown parameters. Closed-form expressions for the maximum likelihood estimators are obtained. Furthermore, theoretical expectations and variances of the estimators are derived. We also discuss the stress–strength reliability estimation problem and construct confidence intervals for the associated reliability measure. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed methods.