Citation

Xie M, Goh TN. Int. J. Reliab. Qual. Safety Eng. 1994; 1(1): 71-78.

Affiliation

Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, National University of Singapore, Kent Ridge, Singapore

Copyright

(Copyright © 1994, World Scientific Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In this paper the problem of system-level reliability growth estimation using component-level failure data is studied. It is suggested that system failure data should be broken down into component, or subsystem, failure data when the above problems have occurred during the system testing phase. The proposed approach is especially useful when the system is not unchanged over the time, when some subsystems are improved more than others, or when the testing has been concentrated on different components at different time. These situations usually happen in practice and it may also be the case even if the system failure data is provided. Two sets of data are used to illustrate the simple approach; one is a set of component failure data for which all subsystems are available for testing at the same time and for the other set of data, the starting times are different for different subsystems.