Compound Poisson approximation in systems reliability

The compound Poisson ‘local’ formulation of the Stein-Chen method is applied to problems in reliability theory. Bounds for the accuracy of the approximation of the reliability by an appropriate compound Poisson distribution are derived under fairly general conditions, and are applied to consecutive-2 and connected-s systems, and the 2-dimensional consecutive-k-out-of-n system, together with a pipeline model. The approximations are usually better than the Poisson ‘local’ approach would give.