A CHARACTERIZATION OF THE NEGATIVE EXPONENTIAL-DISTRIBUTION WITH APPLICATION TO RELIABILITY THEORY

The negative exponential distribution is characterized in terms of two independent random variables. Only one of the random variables has a negative exponential distribution whilst the other can belong to a wide class of distributions. This result is then applied to two models for the reliability of a system of two modules subject to revealed and unrevealed faults to show when the models are equivalent. It is also shown, under certain conditions, that the system availability is only independent of the disturibution of revealed failure times in one module when unrevealed failure times in the other module have a negative exponential distribtuion.