Yongquan Suna,b, Tieyuan Sunc, Michael G. Pechtb, and Chunyu Yua
a Institute of Sensor Reliability Engineering, Harbin University of Science and Technology, Harbin 150080, China
b CALCE, Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20740, USA
c Shanghai Aircraft Custom Service Company Ltd., Shanghai 200240, China
Abstract:
Extracted reliability information is universal in practice and makes it difficult to estimate system
lifetime distributions and reliability. In order to address this problem, this paper develops a method to
compute lifetime distributions of serial, parallel, and serial/parallel systems using the failure probability
density functions of outsourced components, and then to compute system reliability and component importance
measures. Time-varying weights are introduced to simplify the lifetime distribution of a system with
multiple types of components and make the system lifetime distribution to be a sum of component probability
density functions. A case study illustrates the developed method by identifying the lifetime distribution of
a radio navigation system for large passenger aircraft. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed
method, the estimation results from the developed method are compared with the results from a computer
simulation method.
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