Warranty Data Analysis: A Review

Warranty claims and supplementary data contain useful information about product quality and reliability. Analysing such data can therefore be of benefit to manufacturers in identifying early warnings of abnormalities in their products, providing useful information about failure modes to aid design modification, estimating product reliability for deciding on warranty policy and forecasting future warranty claims needed for preparing fiscal plans. In the last two decades, considerable research has been conducted in warranty data analysis (WDA) from several different perspectives. This article attempts to summarise and review the research and developments in WDA with emphasis on models, methods and applications. It concludes with a brief discussion on current practices and possible future trends in WDA

Prediction of remaining life of power transformers based on left truncated and right censored lifetime data

Prediction of the remaining life of high-voltage power transformers is an important issue for energy companies because of the need for planning maintenance and capital expenditures. Lifetime data for such transformers are complicated because transformer lifetimes can extend over many decades and transformer designs and manufacturing practices have evolved. We were asked to develop statistically-based predictions for the lifetimes of an energy company's fleet of high-voltage transmission and distribution transformers. The company's data records begin in 1980, providing information on installation and failure dates of transformers. Although the dataset contains many units that were installed before 1980, there is no information about units that were installed and failed before 1980. Thus, the data are left truncated and right censored. We use a parametric lifetime model to describe the lifetime distribution of individual transformers. We develop a statistical procedure, based on age-adjusted life distributions, for computing a prediction interval for remaining life for individual transformers now in service. We then extend these ideas to provide predictions and prediction intervals for the cumulative number of failures, over a range of time, for the overall fleet of transformers.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/00-AOAS231 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Dynamic Modeling and Statistical Analysis of Event Times

This review article provides an overview of recent work in the modeling and analysis of recurrent events arising in engineering, reliability, public health, biomedicine and other areas. Recurrent event modeling possesses unique facets making it different and more difficult to handle than single event settings. For instance, the impact of an increasing number of event occurrences needs to be taken into account, the effects of covariates should be considered, potential association among the interevent times within a unit cannot be ignored, and the effects of performed interventions after each event occurrence need to be factored in. A recent general class of models for recurrent events which simultaneously accommodates these aspects is described. Statistical inference methods for this class of models are presented and illustrated through applications to real data sets. Some existing open research problems are described.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000349 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Reliability of Agricultural Tractors According to Polish Farmers

The progressing digitisation of European and global agriculture requires a rational approach to the reliability of agricultural machinery and vehicles. It is not easy to access data on failures of their parts, units and systems, which are necessary for classic characterisation of reliability. For this reason, it is necessary to develop other unconventional methods of acquiring information about the technical condition of machinery and convert it into a numerical form. This study presents an original method of quantifying the relative index of reliability of farm tractors based on their owners\u27 subjective opinions. At present the rankings obtained by means of this method are the only tool supporting purchase decisions in situations of uncertainty and risk. Polish farmers found Valtra tractors to be the most reliable. The average reliability index is 0.87. Among 12 brands in the ranking the users rated 11 specific reliability criteria of Valtra tractors the highest. The runner-up was John Deere-a global manufacturer of agricultural machinery and vehicles. The German brand Fendt was the third in the ranking

EEMCS final report for the causal modeling for air transport safety (CATS) project

This document reports on the work realized by the DIAM in relation to the completion of the CATS model as presented in Figure 1.6 and tries to explain some of the steps taken for its completion. The project spans over a period of time of three years. Intermediate reports have been presented throughout the project’s progress. These are presented in Appendix 1. In this report the continuous‐discrete distribution‐free BBNs are briefly discussed. The human reliability models developed for dealing with dependence in the model variables are described and the software application UniNet is presente