The prevailing engineering principle that redundancy at the component level is superior to redundancy at the system level is generalized to coherent systems with dependent components. Sufficient (and necessary) conditions are presented to compare component and system redundancies by means of the usual stochastic, hazard rate, reversed hazard rate, and likelihood ratio orderings. Explicit numerical examples are provided to illustrate the theoretical findings. Some related results in the literature are generalized and extended.

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For many practical situations in reliability engineering, components in the system are usually dependent since they generally work in a collaborative environment. In this paper we build sufficient conditions for comparing two coherent systems under different random environments in the sense of the usual stochastic, hazard rate, reversed hazard rate, and likelihood ratio orders. Applications and numerical examples are provided to illustrate all the theoretical results established here.

We consider coherent systems with independent and identically distributed components. While it is clear that the system’s life will be stochastically larger when the components are replaced with stochastically better components, we show that, in general, similar results may not hold for hazard rate, reverse hazard rate, and likelihood ratio orderings. We find sufficient conditions on the signature vector for these results to hold. These results are combined with other well-known results in the literature to get more general results for comparing two systems of the same size with different signature vectors and possibly with different independent and identically distributed component lifetimes. Some numerical examples are also provided to illustrate the theoretical results.