ON THE ASSOCIATION OF THE LIFELENGTHS OF COMPONENTS SUBJECTED TO A STOCHASTIC ENVIRONMENT

This note is concerned with a system of non-renewable components in parallel subjected to a common environment which is described by a real-valued external stochastic process. Given the environment process, the components are supposed to work independently, and the corresponding failure rates are all increasing (or decreasing) functions of the observed current state. It is then proved that, under these assumptions, the association of the external process implies the association of the component lifelengths. Connection with existing results is underlined.