Reliability analysis is an important component of engineering work that draws on the areas of probability and statistics. As the name suggests, reliability analysis is concerned with the investigation of the failure rates of components and systems, which are typically represented as probabilities. Life testing is a general term used to describe the experimentation and statistical analysis performed to investigate failure rates. Probability distributions that are used to model failure times are typically the exponential distribution, the gamma distribution, the Weibull distribution, and the lognormal distribution.
Statistical analysis can be employed to make inferences on the failure rates under these distributional assumptions or to make general inferences on the distribution of failure times without any modeling assumptions. Data sets of failure times often contain censored data observations where the exact failure time is known only to lie within a certain region and is not known exactly. The product limit estimator allows the estimation of the failure time distribution when some of the data observations are censored in this way.
The reliability of a component, which can be denoted by r, can in general be thought of as the probability that it performs a certain task. The complement of this probability is therefore the probability that the component fails to perform the required task, or the probability that the component “fails.” probability distributions are employed to model how these reliabilities vary with time. A complex system may consist of a large number of components each with its own reliability value. A system reliability diagram can be used to show how the failure of the various components affects the overall status of the system. The overall system operates successfully only if it is possible to progress from one side of the diagram to the other side by passing only through components that have not failed. If this is
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