The Independence Assumption for a Series or Parallel System When Component Lifetimes Are Exponential

A common assumption made In modeling system life from series and parallel systems is that the component lives are independent. This study investigates the magnitude of the errors one may incur by erroneously asuming the component lifetimes have independent exponential distributions when in fact the lifetimes follow the bivariate exponential distribution of Marshall & Olkin (series or parallel systems) or that of Freund (parallel systems).