ON THE BEHAVIORS OF THE PERCENTILE RESIDUAL LIFE FOR COMPONENTS AND FOR K-OUT-OF-N SYSTEMS

This paper investigates properties of the percentile residual life (PRL) function for a single component and for a k-out-of-n system. The shape of the component PRL function can be determined by the component failure rate function. The intimate relations between these two functions are studied first. Then we generalize the results to a k-out-of-n system by assuming independent and identical components. We show that the behavior of the PRL for a k-out-of-n system is quite different from the component PRL. We also find that for series and parallel systems, the location of the change point of the PRL is monotone in the number of components in a system.