A non-Hermitian quantum approach to reliability of a two-state system

We explore the concept of the reliability theory in the quantum domain, by giving a Hilbert structure to the system states, then utilize a non-Hermitian Schrodinger equation to describe the state evolution and finally derive two new lifetime distributions. Beyond this, the alternative density matrix approach implies that the degradation term can be separated into two parts, one only related to the system properties and the other only influenced by the environment. Applications on six real data sets further show that the proposed models can outperform the existing well-known distributions, which verifies the validity of the proposed method. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.