Equivalence of the Hazard Rate and Usual Stochastic Orders for Parallel Systems

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate stochastic comparisons of parallel systems, and obtain two characterization results in this regard. First, we compare a parallel system with independent heterogeneous components to a parallel system with homogeneous components, and establish some certain assumptions under which the hazard rate and usual stochastic orders between the lifetimes of two parallel systems are equivalent. Next, we turn our attention to two parallel systems with their component lifetimes following multiple-outlier model and prove that under some specified assumptions, the $p$-larger order between the vectors of scale parameters is equivalent to the hazard rate order as well as the usual stochastic order between the lifetimes of these systems. The results established here are applicable to compute an upper bound for the hazard rate function and a lower bound for the survival function of a parallel systems consisting of heterogeneous components.