Testing for reliability improvement or deterioration in repairable systems

摘要

AbstractThis paper reviews the derivation and application of the reverse arrangement test which is used to assess whether a system has improved or deteriorated in a reliability sense. Because the well‐known and published table of statistics for this test is erroneous, the prime objective of this paper is to provide the correct statistical table. A secondary aim, however, is to demonstrate how this table can be applied when there is a paucity of failure data for each individual system and to show how a more meaningful reliability assessment can be obtained by pooling results, from the reverse arrangement test, for several system