Preservation of some partial orderings under Poisson shock models

Abstract

Suppose each of the two devices is subjected to shocks occurring randomly as events in a Poisson process with constant intensity λ. Let Pk denote the probability that the first device will survive the first k shocks and let denote such a probability for the second device. Let and denote the survival functions of the first and the second device respectively. In this note we show that some partial orderings, namely likelihood ratio ordering, failure rate ordering, stochastic ordering, variable ordering and mean residual-life ordering between the shock survival probabilities and are preserved by the corresponding survival functions and .