Reliability of systems subject to common-cause hazards assumed to obey an exponential power model

A model is proposed for the analysis of systems subject to common-cause failures that are not considered to have constant rate but that are assumed to obey an exponential power model. To represent common-cause failures, we use the Marshall-Olkin formulation of the multivariate exponential distribution. Specifically, the components are subject to failure by Poisson failure processes that govern the simultaneous failure of a specific subset of the components. The method for calculating the system reliability requires that a procedure exists for determining the system reliability from component reliabilities, under the statistically independent component assumption. The paper includes an example to illustrate the method.