Contributor

Hon Keung Tony Ng

Abstract

In industrial engineering and manufacturing, assessing the reliability of a product or system is an important topic. Life-testing and reliability experiments are commonly used reliability assessment methods to gain sound knowledge about product or system lifetime distributions. Usually, a sample of items of interest is subjected to stresses and environmental conditions that characterize the normal operating conditions. During the life-test, successive times to failure are recorded and lifetime data are collected. Life-testing is useful in many industrial environments, including the automobile, materials, telecommunications, and electronics industries.

There are different kinds of life-testing experiments that can be applied for different purposes. For instance, accelerated life tests (ALTs) and censored life tests are commonly used to acquire information in reliability and life-testing experiments with the presence of time and resource limitations. Statistical inference based on the data obtained from a life test and effectively planning a life-testing experiment subject to some constraints are two important problems statisticians are interested in. The experimental design problem for a life test has long been studied; however, the experimental planning considering putting the experimental units into systems for a life-test has not been studied. In this thesis, we study the optimal experimental planning problem in multiple stress levels life-testing experiments and progressively Type-II censored life-testing experiments when the test units can be put into coherent systems for the experiment.

Based on the notion of system signature, a tool in structure reliability to represent the structure of a coherent system, under different experimental settings, models and assumptions, we derive the maximum likelihood estimators of the model parameters and the expected Fisher information matrix. Then, we use the expected Fisher information matrix to obtain the asymptotic variance-covariance matrix of the maximum likelihood estimators when $n$-component coherent systems are used in the life-testing experiment. Based on different optimality criteria, such as $D$-optimality, $A$-optimality and $V$-optimality, we obtain the optimal experimental plans under different settings. Numerical and Monte Carlo simulation studies are used to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of using systems in life-testing experiments.

Degree Date

Summer 2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Statistical Science

Advisor

Hon Keung Tony Ng

Subject Area

Statistics

Number of Pages

176

Format

.pdf

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

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