Using Simulation to Design Reliability Demonstration Tests

Designing reliability demonstration tests is an integral part of any reliability program. These tests are often required to demonstrate customer reliability and confidence requirements. While it is desirable to be able to test a large population of units to failure in order to obtain information on a product's or design's reliability, time and resource constraints sometimes make this impossible. In cases such as these, a test can be run on a specified number of units, or for a specified amount of time, that will demonstrate that the product has met or exceeded a given reliability at a given confidence level. In the final analysis, the actual reliability of the units will of course remain unknown, but the reliability engineer will be able to state that certain specifications have been met. In addition to analytical methods (such as the Parametric Binomial, the Non-Parametric Binomial and the Exponential Chi-Squared methods), a simulation method is also possible.

This article explores the application of simulation and the SimuMatic tool to design a reliability demonstration test.

Bayesian Confidence Bounds

One of the many new additions to Weibull++ 7 is the method of estimating confidence bounds based on the Bayes theorem. This type of confidence bounds relies on a different school of thought in statistical analysis, where prior information is combined with sample data in order to make inferences about model parameters and their functions. An introduction to Bayesian methods is given in this article.

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