Confidence Limits for System Reliability: A Sequential Method

A sequential method is given for obtaining confidence limits for system reliability when ``pass-fail´´ test data have been obtained on components. Costs of testing are examined and a rule is derived for determining the order in which to test the components so that the average cost of testing is minimized. The method is presented first for series systems, but in Section IV the extension to parallel systems is considered and in Section V the procedure is applied to a series-parallel configuration. Comparisons are given with fixed sample-size testing and it is shown that the sequential method is statistically efficient and that many of the difficulties encountered when using fixed sample sizes are eliminated by testing sequentially.