Study on segmented distribution for reliability evaluation

In practice, the failure rate of most equipment exhibits different tendencies at different stages and even its failure rate curve behaves a multimodal trace during its life cycle. As a result, traditionally evaluating the reliability of equipment with a single model may lead to severer errors. However, if lifetime is divided into several different intervals according to the characteristics of its failure rate, piecewise fitting can more accurately approximate the failure rate of equipment. Therefore, in this paper, failure rate is regarded as a piecewise function, and two kinds of segmented distribution are put forward to evaluate reliability. In order to estimate parameters in the segmented reliability function, Bayesian estimation and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of the segmented distribution are discussed in this paper. Since traditional information criterion is not suitable for the segmented distribution, an improved information criterion is proposed to test and evaluate the segmented reliability model in this paper. After a great deal of testing and verification, the segmented reliability model and its estimation methods presented in this paper are proven more efficient and accurate than the traditional non-segmented single model, especially when the change of the failure rate is time-phased or multimodal. The significant performance of the segmented reliability model in evaluating reliability of proximity sensors of leading-edge flap in civil aircraft indicates that the segmented distribution and its estimation method in this paper could be useful and accurate.