Birnbaum and Saunders introduced a two-parameter lifetime distribution to model the fatigue life of a metal, subject to cyclic stress. Since then, extensive work has been done on this model providing different interpretations, constructions, generalizations, inferential methods, and extensions to bivariate, multivariate, and matrix-variate cases. More than 200 papers and one research monograph have already appeared describing all these aspects and developments. In this paper, we provide a detailed review of all these developments and, at the same time, indicate several open problems that could be considered for further research.
KEYWORDSBayes estimators, EM algorithm, Fisher information matrix, hazard function, length-biased distribution, moments and inverse moments, probability density function, stochastic orderings, TP 2 property 4