Abstract Imperfect repair (IR) modelling has attracted a lot of attention during the last decades. To assess and predict repairable systems' reliability, analysts have to choose among a plethora of models: renewal processes, non‐homogeneous Poisson processes (NHPPs), Brown–Proschan, Kijima, ARA, ARI, Quasi‐Renewal (QR), Trend‐Renewal and so forth. Choosing an appropriate model for a given failures, dataset is an important practical issue. The fit of an IR model can be assessed using goodness‐of‐fit (GoF) tests but very few have been proposed and a good fit to past data does not guarantee good reliability predictions. This work proposes general GoF tests for IR models based on sequential (or on‐line) assessment of times‐to‐failures forecasts. The suggested predictive‐sequential (or prequential) GoF tests have a low computational complexity and a common test statistic for several IR models. These tests have been proved to be asymptotically distribution‐free (ADF) for renewal and power‐law processes (PLPs). Our numerical simulations and preliminary theoretical results highly suggest that this ADF property still holds for several other IR models. The prequential tests are much easier to use than the already known bootstrap tests, and a simulation study shows that they are also slightly more powerful. The simulations also show that the prequential tests are powerful to identify classes of similar appropriate models but are much less powerful to distinguish models belonging to the same class. A comparison of MTTF estimates show that models from the same class give close reliability predictions and that the tests are able to reject models which would yield to dramatic errors in reliability?predictions.
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