Analysis of time-to-failure data with weibull model in product life cycle management

Abstract

In remanufacturing practices, understanding and communicating the failure risk and reliability of a critical part, component or subsystem plays a crucial role as it has a significant impact on the lifecycle management of the product and thus determines the success of the remanufacturing process. In this respect, statistical time-to-failure analysis provides a very powerful and versatile analytical tool for reliability analysis and risk assessment. Among various statistical tools available, Weibull model which uses time series data on records of failure incidents of a product for the fitting of a parametric distribution, is a powerful approach to characterizing the time-to-failure probability function of the product. It is able to provide valuable information for optimized lifecycle management and remanufacturing process. This paper demonstrates successful applications of Weibull model for time-to-failure analysis using case studies in remanufacturing practices and proposes a statistical approach to assess the reliability of critical parts and components for remanufacturing in the product's lifecycle management. It is envisaged that the research results are able to benefit remanufacturing practices in many ways such as reducing warranty loss by minimizing probability of failure of remanufactured critical parts and components.