Mathematics Commons^™

Degradation Models And Implied Lifetime Distributions, Suk Joo Bae, Way Kuo, Paul H. Kvam

Department of Math & Statistics Faculty Publications

In experiments where failure times are sparse, degradation analysis is useful for the analysis of failure time distributions in reliability studies. This research investigates the link between a practitioner's selected degradation model and the resulting lifetime model. Simple additive and multiplicative models with single random effects are featured. Results show that seemingly innocuous assumptions of the degradation path create surprising restrictions on the lifetime distribution. These constraints are described in terms of failure rate and distribution classes.