Lifetime Estimation for Mixed Replacement Grouped Data in Competing Failures Model

The estimation of mean lifetimes in presence of interval censoring with mixed replacement procedure is examined when the distributions of lifetimes are exponential. It is assumed that, due to physical restrictions and/or economic constraints, the number of failures is investigated only at several inspection times during the lifetime test; thus there is interval censoring. The maximum likelihood estimator is found in an implicit form. The Cramor-Rao lower bound, which is the asymptotic variance of the estimator, is derived. The estimation of mean lifetimes for competing failures model has been expanded.