A New Reliability Function

Based on the Markov model for the description of the reliability behavior of an item and on the mixed-exponential expression for the reliability analysis, a new reliability function is defined. By introducing pseudointervals, states are defined corresponding to pseudointervals for a set of time-interval failure data. For a given number of pseudointervals with fixed boundaries, the number of parameters is reduced to two. An example illustrates the application of the function to the bathtub-shape hazard rate.