This paper studies a load sharing k-out-of-n:F system such that its components degrade over time. Degradation of components causes dependent competing failures including soft and hard failures. After each failure, the extra workload redistributes on the surviving components and makes the change in distribution of degradation and hazard rate function of components. Furthermore, it makes a dependency property between the failure time of the components at consecutive stages of load sharing. Conditional distribution of the soft and hard failures as well as reliability function of the system are investigated. The maximum likelihood estimators of the unknown parameters and reliability function are also derived numerically. Moreover, a comprehensive example is presented to illustrate the proposed procedure in the paper. Finally, a simulation study is done and the parameter uncertainty problem is studied.

Keywords