TY - JOUR
T1 - Methods of reliability demonstration testing and their relationships
AU - Guo, Huairui
AU - Liao, Haitao
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received November 21, 2010; revised March 31, 2011; accepted April 04, 2011. Date of publication September 29, 2011; date of current version March 02, 2012. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CMMI-0954667. Associate Editor: J. C. Lu. H. Guo is with ReliaSoft Corporation, Tucson, AZ 85710 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). H. T. Liao is with the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Department of Industrial and Information Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996 USA (e-mail: [email protected]). Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TR.2011.2167782
PY - 2012/3
Y1 - 2012/3
N2 - Reliability Demonstration Testing (RDT) has been widely used in industry to verify whether a product has met a certain reliability requirement with a stated confidence level. To design RDTs, methods have been developed based on either the number of failures or the failure times. However, practitioners often have difficulty in determining which method to use for a specific design problem. In particular, the method based on the number of failures cannot be used when all the units are tested to failure, while the alternative based on failure times falls short in dealing with cases where no failures are expected. This paper elaborates on the two methods, and compares them from both practical and theoretical standpoints. The detailed discussions regarding the relationship between the two methods will help practitioners design RDTs, and understand when the two methods will lead to similar designs. A Weibull distribution is used in the relevant mathematical derivations, but the results can be extended to other widely used failure time distributions. Case studies are provided to demonstrate the use of the two methods in practice, and in developing equivalent RDT designs.
AB - Reliability Demonstration Testing (RDT) has been widely used in industry to verify whether a product has met a certain reliability requirement with a stated confidence level. To design RDTs, methods have been developed based on either the number of failures or the failure times. However, practitioners often have difficulty in determining which method to use for a specific design problem. In particular, the method based on the number of failures cannot be used when all the units are tested to failure, while the alternative based on failure times falls short in dealing with cases where no failures are expected. This paper elaborates on the two methods, and compares them from both practical and theoretical standpoints. The detailed discussions regarding the relationship between the two methods will help practitioners design RDTs, and understand when the two methods will lead to similar designs. A Weibull distribution is used in the relevant mathematical derivations, but the results can be extended to other widely used failure time distributions. Case studies are provided to demonstrate the use of the two methods in practice, and in developing equivalent RDT designs.
KW - Binomial distribution
KW - Weibull distribution
KW - reliability demonstration test
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U2 - 10.1109/TR.2011.2167782
DO - 10.1109/TR.2011.2167782
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84858160327
SN - 0018-9529
VL - 61
SP - 231
EP - 237
JO - IEEE Transactions on Reliability
JF - IEEE Transactions on Reliability
IS - 1
M1 - 6030958
ER -