 The failure rate dynamics in heterogeneous populationsJi Hwan Cha and Maxim Finkelstein Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2013, vol. 112, issue C, 120-128 Abstract: Most populations encountered in real world are heterogeneous. In reliability applications, the mixture (observed) failure rate, obviously, can be considered as a measure of ‘average’ quality in these populations. However, in addition to this average measure, some variability characteristics for failure rates can be very helpful in describing the time-dependent changes in quality of heterogeneous populations. In this paper, we discuss variance and the coefficient of variation of the corresponding random failure rate as variability measures for items in heterogeneous populations. Furthermore, there is often a risk that items of poor quality are selected for important missions. Therefore, along with the ‘average quality’ of a population, more ‘conservative’ quality measures should be also defined and studied. For this purpose, we propose the percentile and the tail-mixture of the failure rates as the corresponding conservative measures. Some illustrative examples are given. Keywords: Heterogeneous population; Stochastically ordered subpopulations; Quality measures; Variance; Coefficient of variation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:112:y:2013:i:c:p:120-128 DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2012.11.012 Access Statistics for this article Reliability Engineering and System Safety is currently edited by Carlos Guedes Soares More articles in Reliability Engineering and System Safety from Elsevier |
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