Modelling sales lag and reliability of an automobile component from warranty database

摘要

Automotive manufacturing companies utilise the warranty database as a very rich source of field reliability data that provides valuable information to enhance the quality and reliability of their products and for feedback to new product development systems on products performance in actual usage conditions. However, the information in the warranty database is often incomplete and thus requires special methods of analysis. This paper analyses a special type of warranty database of an automobile component where the sales amounts are unknown in the database. The sales amounts are necessary to calculate the risk and censored data sets and finally to estimate the lifetime distribution of the component. This paper presents methodology to fit the lifetime distribution and to estimate the reliability of the component based on warranty database.