Evaluating failure time probabilities for a Markovian wear process

Reliability models that incorporate the effect of a stochastic and dynamic environment on a unit's lifetime have attracted a moderate amount of attention in the past decade. However, evaluating failure time probabilities using such models is nontrivial in all but a few cases. Kharoufeh [1] provided a closed-form lifetime distribution for a continuous Markovian wear process as a two-dimensional Laplace transform. The main purpose of this paper is to reduce the lifetime distribution to a one-dimensional Laplace transform in order to facilitate simpler numerical implementation.