Real-time Reliability Evaluation for an Individual Product Based on Change-point Gamma and Wiener Process

Abstract

Reliability evaluation based on degradation data has received significant attentions in recent years. However, existing works often assume that the degradation evolution over time is governed by a single stochastic process, which may not be realistic if change points exist. Here, for cases of degradation with change points, this paper attempts to capture the degradation process with a multi-phase degradation model and find the method to evaluate the real-time reliability of the product being monitored. Once new degradation information becomes available, the evaluation results are adaptively updated through the Bayesian method. In particular, for a two-stage degradation process of liquid coupling devices (LCDs), a model named as change-point gamma and Wiener process is developed, after which issues of real-time reliability evaluation and parameters’ estimation are addressed in detail. Finally, the proposed method is illustrated by a case study of LCDs, and the corresponding results indicate that trustful evaluation results depend on the fitting accuracy in cases of multi-phase degradation process. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.