Some life tests are terminated with few or no failures. In such cases, a recent approach is to obtain degradation measurements of product performance that may contain some useful information about product reliability. Generally degradation paths of products are modeled by a nonlinear regression model with random coefficients. If we can obtain the estimates of parameters under the model, then the time-to-failure distribution can be estimated. In some cases, the patterns of a few degradation paths are different from those of most degradation paths in a test. Therefore, this study develops a weighted method based on fuzzy clustering procedure to robust estimation of the underlying parameters and time-to-failure distribution. The method will be studied on a real data set.
關聯:
Quality and Reliability Engineering International 16(4), pp.261-267