In this paper, a new lifetime distribution is defined and studied. We refer to the new distribution as alpha power Weibull distribution. The importance of the new distribution comes from its ability to model monotone and non monotone failure rate functions, which are quite common in reliability studies. Various properties of the proposed distribution are obtained including moments, quantiles, entropy, order statistics, mean residual life function, and stress-strength parameter. The maximum likelihood estimation method is used to estimate the parameters. Two real data sets are used to illustrate the importance of the proposed distribution.

In this paper, we introduce a new family of continuous distributions that is called the modified Kies family of distributions. The main mathematical properties of the new family are derived. A special case of the new family has been considered in more detail; namely, the two parameters modified Kies exponential distribution with bathtub shape, decreasing and increasing failure rate function. The importance of the new distribution comes from its ability in modeling positively and negatively skewed real data over some generalized distributions with more than two parameters. The shape behavior of the hazard rate and the mean residual life functions of the modified Kies exponential distribution are discussed. We use the method of maximum likelihood to estimate the distribution parameters based on complete and type-II censored samples. The approximate confidence intervals are also obtained under the two schemes. A simulation study is conducted and two real data sets from the engineering field are analyzed to show the flexibility of the new distribution in modeling real life data.