Degradation modeling for reliability analysis with time-dependent structure based on the inverse gaussian distribution

Abstract

Conventional reliability analysis techniques are focused on the occurrence of failures over time. However, in certain situations where the occurrence of failures is tiny or almost null, the estimation of the quantities that describe the failure process is compromised. In this context the degradation models were developed, which have as experimental data not the failure, but some quality characteristic attached to it. Degradation analysis can provide information about the components lifetime distribution without actually observing failures. In this thesis we proposed different methodologies for degradation data based on the inverse Gaussian distribution. Initially, we introduced the inverse Gaussian deterioration rate model for degradation data and a study of its asymptotic properties with simulated data. We then proposed an inverse Gaussian process model with frailty as a feasible tool to explore the influence of unobserved covariates, and a comparative study with the traditional inverse Gaussian process based on simulated data was made. We also presented a mixture inverse Gaussian process model in burn-in tests, whose main interest is to determine the burn-in time and the optimal cutoff point that screen out the weak units from the normal ones in a production row, and a misspecification study was carried out with the Wiener and gamma processes. Finally, we considered a more flexible model with a set of cutoff points, wherein the misclassification probabilities are obtained by the exact method with the bivariate inverse Gaussian distribution or an approximate method based on copula theory. The application of the methodology was based on three real datasets in the literature: the degradation of LASER components, locomotive wheels and cracks in metals.