Estimating the turning point of a bathtub-shaped failure distribution

Abstract

The turning point of a hazard rate function is useful in assessing the hazard in the useful life phase and helps to determine and plan appropriate burn-in, maintenance, and repair policies and strategies. For many bathtub-shaped distributions, the turning point is unique, and the hazard varies little in the useful life phase. We investigate the performance of an empirical estimator for the turning point in the case of the modified Weibull distribution, a bathtub-shaped generalization of the Weibull distribution, that has been found to be useful in reliability engineering and other areas concerned with life-time data. We illustrate the theory by means of an example, and also conduct a simulation study to assess the performance of the estimator in practice. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.