Monthly Archives: September 2023

Title:   Assurance for Sample Size Determination in Reliability Demonstration Testing Authors & Year:   Kevin Wilson & Malcolm Farrow (2021) Journal:   Technometrics [DOI: 10.1080/00401706.2020.1867646] Why Reliability Demonstration Testing? Ensuring high reliability is critical for hardware products, especially those involved in safety-critical functions such as railway systems and nuclear power reactors. To build trust, manufacturers use reliability demonstration tests (RDT) where a sample of products is tested and failures are observed. If the test meets specific criteria, it demonstrates the product’s reliability. The RDT design varies based on the type of hardware product being tested, whether it is failure on demand or time to failure. Traditionally, sample sizes for RDT have been determined using methods that consider the power of a hypothesis test or risk criteria. Various approaches, such as Bayesian methods and risk criteria evaluation, have been developed over the decades in order to enhance the effectiveness of RDT. These measures…

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The setting repeats depressingly often. A hurricane inching towards the Florida coast. Weather scientists glued to tracking monitors, hunched over simulation printouts, trying to remove people out of harm’s way. Urgent to them is the need to mark a patch of the shore where the hurricane is likely to hit. Those living in this patch need to be relocated. These scientists, and many before them – it’s hard to say since when – realized what’s at issue here is not quite so much the precise location the storm is going to hit – precise to the exact grain of sand, but a stretch of land (whose length may shrink gradually depending on how late we leave the forecasting) where it is going to affect people with a high chance.  A forecast interval of sorts.

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