An Allocation Scheme for Estimating the Reliability of a Parallel-Series System.

We give a hybrid two stage design which can be useful to estimate the reliability of a parallel-series and/or by duality a series-parallel system, when the component reliabilities are unknown as well as the total numbers of units allowed to be tested in each subsystem. When a total sample size is fixed large, asymptotic optimality is proved systematically and validated via Monte Carlo simulation.