Field Failure Data: an Alternative Proposal for Reliability Estimation

Abstract

Product reliability is a very important issue for the competitive strategy of industries. In order to estimate a product's reliability, parametric inferential methods are required to evaluate survival test data, which happens to be a fairly expensive data source. Such costly information usually imposes additional compromises in the product development and new challenges to be overcome throughout the product's life cycle. However, manufacturers also keep field failure data for warranty and maintenance purposes, which can be a low-cost data source for reliability estimation. Field-failure data are very difficult to evaluate using parametric inferential methods due to their small and highly censored samples, quite often representing mixed modes of failure. In this paper a method for reliability estimation using field failure data is proposed. The proposal is based on the use of non-parametric inferential methods, associated with resampling techniques to derive confidence intervals for the reliability estimates. Test results show the adequacy of the proposed method to calculate reliability estimates and their confidence interval for different populations, including cases with highly right-censored failure data. The method is shown to be particularly useful when the sampling distribution is not known, which happens to be the case in a large number of practical reliability evaluations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.