Reliability Modeling and Analysis for a Unit with Multiple Causes of Failure

다수의 고장 원인을 갖는 기기의 신뢰성 모형화 및 분석

This paper presents a reliability model and a data-analytic procedure for a repairable unit subject to failures due to multiple non-identifiable causes. We regard a failure cause as a state and assume the life distribution for each cause to be exponential. Then we represent the dependency among the causes by a Markov switching model(MSM) and estimate the transition probabilities and failure rates by maximum likelihood(ML) method. The failure data are incomplete due to masked causes of failures. We propose a specific version of EM(expectation and maximization) algorithm for finding maximum likelihood estimator(MLE) under this situation. We also develop statistical procedures for determining the number of significant states and for testing independency between state transitions. Our model requires only the successive failure times of a unit to perform the statistical analysis. It works well even when the causes of failures are fully masked, which overcomes the major deficiency of competing risk models. It does not require the assumption of stationarity or independency which is essential in mixture models. The stationary probabilities of states can be easily calculated from the transition probabilities estimated in our model, so it covers mixture models in general. The results of simulations show the consistency of estimation and accuracy gradually increasing according to the difference of failure rates and the frequency of transitions among the states.