Estimations of Parameters in Multi-component Series Systems Using Masked Data

The exact cause of the system's failure is often unknown in the masked system lifetime data. In such type of data, there are two observable quantities, namely (i) the systems time to failure and (ii) the set of systems components that contains the component, which might cause the system to fail. Our objective in this paper is to use the maximum likelihood procedure in the presence of masked data to make inference for the reliability of the system's components. We assume a multi-component series system where each component has a constant failure rate. Different cases that permit for closed form solutions of point estimates are considered. The results obtained in this paper generalize other published results.