Reliability and Quality Control

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
 Notions of reliability and Quality
 Link between Reliability and Quality
 Statistical Quality Control and Reliability Tests
 Statistical Quality Control
 Statistical Reliability Tests
 Tests for Stationarity
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 Notions of reliability: Product reliability
 Reliabilityof a product (or system) conveys information about the
absence of failures, and is usually defined as the probability that
the system will perform its intended function for a specified time
period when operating under normal (or stated) environmental
conditions.
 This definition deals with the following four important points:
◦ Intended function. It actually defines what the failure is. Failure
can be a total loss of function (termed as hard failure) or a part
loss of performance when the performance degrades to a
specified level (termed as function failure or soft failure).
◦ Uncertainty or randomness of time to failure. It is reflected by the
word “probability.” The uncertainty is due to many factors,
including the variability in raw materials, manufacturing,
operating, and environmental conditions.
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 Notions of reliability: Product reliability
◦ Planning horizon or mission duration. It is reflected by the phrase
“specified time period.”
◦ Use environment. It is reflected by the phrase “normal or stated
environmental conditions.”
The product reliability is important to both manufacturer and
consumer.
For the manufacturer, the consequences due to product unreliability
can be warranty cost, customer satisfaction, product reputation,
market share, and profit. Over the warranty period, the cost to rectify
failures is borne by the manufacturer but the owner can have
production and other losses. As such, effective management of
product reliability requires making proper reliability-related decisions
using a PLC frame-work.
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 Notions of reliability: Product reliability
The main issues to address include the following:
◦ Why systems fail and this refers to reliability physics;
◦ How to develop reliable systems and this refers to reliability
based design;
◦ How to measure and test reliability in different stages and
this refers to reliability assessment and reliability testing;
◦ How to maintain systems reliable and this refers to
maintenance, fault diagnosis, and prognosis.

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 Notions of reliability: Product quality
 Product proposes the following five criteria for defining the notion of
quality:
1. Judgmental criteria. Here, quality is associated with something universally
recognizable as a mark of high standard, achievement, or degree of excellence,
and hence is called the transcendent definition.
2. Product-based criteria. Here, quality is defined in terms of some measurable
variable such as the acceleration of a car, efficiency of an engine, or the like.
3. User-based criteria. Here, quality is defined through “fitness for intended use.”
For example, the user-based quality for a car may be smoothness of the ride,
ease of steering, etc.
4. Value-based criteria. Here, quality is linked to the price of the product and its
usefulness or satisfaction.
5. Manufacturing-based criteria: Here, quality is defined in terms of manufactured
items conforming to the design specification. Items that do not conform either
need some rectification action to make them conform or need to be scrapped.
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 Notions of reliability: Product quality
The product quality involves many dimensions. Garvin suggests
the following eight quality dimensions:
1. Performance. This characterizes the primary operating characteristics
or specific functions of the product. For a car, it can include
acceleration, braking distance, efficiency of engine, emissive pollution
generated, and so on.
2. Features. These are the special or additional features of a product. For
example, for a car, the features include air conditioner, cruise control,
or the like.
3. Aesthetics. This deals with issues such as appearance, feel, sound, and
so on. For a car, the body design and interior layout reflect the quality
in this sense.
4. Reliability. This is a measure of the product performing satisfactorily
over a specified time under stated conditions of use. Simply speaking,
it reflects how often the product fails .
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 Notions of reliability: Product quality
The product quality involves many dimensions. Garvin
suggests the following eight quality dimensions:
5. Durability. This is an indicator of the time interval after which the
product has deteriorated sufficiently so that it is unacceptable for use.
For a car, it may correspond to corrosion affecting the frame and body
to such a level that it is no longer safe to drive.
6. (Serviceability. This deals with all maintenance related issues,
including frequency and cost of maintenance, ease of repair,
availability of spares, and so on.
7. Conformance. This indicates the degree to which the physical and
performance characteristics meet some pre-established standards (i.e.,
design requirements).

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 Notions of reliability: Product quality
The product quality involves many dimensions. Garvin
suggests the following eight quality dimensions:
8. Perceived quality. This refers to the perceptions of the buyers or
potential buyers. This impression is shaped by several factors such as
advertising, the reputation of the company or product, consumer
report, etc.

Product quality deals with quality of design and quality of

conformance. The quality of design means that the products
can be produced in different levels of quality, and this is
achieved by the differences in design.

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 Notions of reliability: Product quality

The quality of conformance means that the product conforms

to the specifications required by design, and this is influenced
by many factors such as manufacturing processes and quality
assurance system.

Quality engineering is the set of operational, managerial and

engineering activities used to ensure that the quality
characteristics of a product are at the required levels.

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 Notions of reliability: Product quality
Due to variability in the manufacturing process, some items
produced may not meet the design specification and such items
are called nonconforming.
The performance of nonconforming items is usually inferior to
the performance of conforming items. As a result,
nonconforming items are less reliable than conforming items in
terms of reliability measures such as mean time to failure.

In a broad sense, reliability is one of quality dimensions and

usually termed as “time-oriented quality” or “quality over
time”

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 Notions of reliability: Product quality
However, quality is different from reliability in a narrow sense.
This can be explained by looking at quality and reliability
defects
Quality defects usually deal with deficient products (or
components) or incorrectly assembled sets, which can be
identified by inspection against component drawings or
assembly specifications.
In this sense, quality is expressed in percentages. On the other
hand, reliability defects generally deal with the failures of a
product in the future when it has been working well..
 Therefore, reliability is expressed as the proportion of the survived items
to the population at a certain time. Simply speaking, quality is usually
understood as conformance-quality at present and reliability as non-
failure in the future. 06/04/2021 11
 Statistical Quality Control & Reliability Test
Statistical quality control and reliability tests are
performed to estimate or demonstrate quality and
reliability characteristics on the basis of data collected
from sampling tests.

Estimation leads to point or interval estimate and

demonstration is a test of a given hypothesis on the
unknown characteristic.

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 Statistical Quality Control
One of the main purposes of statistical quality control is to use
sampling tests to estimate or demonstrate the defective
probability p of a given item, to a required accuracy and often
on the basis of tests by attributes (i.e., tests of type good / bad).
However, considering p as an unknown probability, a broader
field of applications can be covered by the same methods.
In this section, p will be considered as a defective probability
(fraction of defective items).
It will be assumed that “p” is the same for each element in the
sample considered and that each sample element is independent
from each other.
These assumptions presuppose that the lot is homogeneous and
much larger than the sample 06/04/2021 13
 Statistical Quality Control
Variousstatistical techniques have been developed to control
and improve quality.

Major strategies for quality control and improvement strategies

in a production system fall into the following three categories:
◦ Inspection and testing for raw materials and final product,
◦ Statistical process control, and
◦ Quality control by optimization

Statisticalprocess control (SPC) is a method of quality control

 in which statistical methods are employed. SPC is applied in
order to monitor and control a process.
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 Statistical Quality Control
Monitoring and controlling the process ensures that it
operates at its full potential. At its full potential, the
process can make as much conforming product as
possible with a minimum (if not an elimination) of
waste (rework or scrap).
SPC can be applied to any process where the
"conforming product" (product meeting specifications)
output can be measured.
Key tools used in SPC include control charts; a focus on 
continuous improvement; and 
the design of experiments. An example of a process
where SPC is applied is manufacturing lines.
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 Statistical Reliability Test
 Reliability tests are useful to evaluate the reliability achieved in a given
item. Early initiation of such tests allows quick identification and cost-
effective correction of weaknesses not discovered by reliability analyses.
 Reliability tests are generally time-consuming and expensive, they must be
coordinated with other tests. Test conditions should be as close as possible
to those experienced in the field.
 A repairable system can fail several times since the failed system can be
restored to its operating condition through corrective maintenance actions.
 If the repair time is neglected, the times to failure form a failure point
process. The time between the (i-1)th failure and the ith failure, Xi, is a
continuous random variable. Depending on the effect of the maintenance
actions, the inter-failure times Xi’s are generally not i.i.d. As such, we need
new models and methods for modeling the failure process
 A point process is a continuous time stochastic process characterized by
events (e.g., failures) that occur randomly.
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 Statistical Reliability Test
 Let N(t) denote the cumulative failure number in time interval (0, t), which
is a discrete random variable. A failure point process satisfies the
following:
◦ N(0)=0
◦ N(t) is non negative integer;
◦ N(t) is non decreasing; and
◦ for s < t, N(t)-N(s) is the number of failures in (s,t)
 Three typical counting processes are renewal process (RP), Homogeneous
Poisson process (HPP), and Nonhomogeneous Poisson process (NHPP).
 A failure counting process is a renewal process if the inter-failure times
Xi’s are a sequence of Independent and Identically Distributed (i.i.d)
random variables with distribution function F(x). The expected number of
renewals in (0; t) is called renewal function.

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 Statistical Reliability Test
Ifthe times between failures are independent and identically
exponentially distributed, the renewal process reduces into a
homogeneous Poisson process (also termed as stationary
Poisson process). In this case, N(t) follows a Poisson distribution
with the Poisson parameter λt, where λ is failure intensity.

The NHPP is also termed as nonstationary Poisson process. Its

increment, ΔN=N(t+s) – N(s), s > 0, follows the Poisson distribution
with mean

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 Tests for Stationarity
Stationarity is time invariance of the data. For example, inter-
failure times in repairable systems undergoing reliability
growth testing usually increases with time statistically and
inter-failure times in repairable systems in service can be
decreasing with time statistically.
If such trends do not exist, the failure process of the system is
stationary.
The objective of stationarity tests is to determine whether the
pattern of failures is significantly changing with time so as to
select appropriate models for modelling the data.
When a repairable system is repaired to good-as-new condition
following each failure, then the failure process can be viewed as
an RP (Renewal Process)
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 Tests for Stationarity
For an RP, the times between failures are Independent and
Identically Distributed (i.i.d). As mentioned earlier, the HPP is a
special RP where inter failure times are i.i.d. exponential
random variables.

In reliability trend tests, the null hypothesis H is that the

underlying process of the inter-arrival times is stationary.

When the null hypothesis is HPP, rejecting Ho just implies that

the process does not follow an HPP, and does not necessarily
imply that there exists a trend in the process.

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 Tests with HPP Null Hypothesis
  
Tests with HPP null hypothesis include Crow test, Laplace test,
and Anderson Darling test.
Crow test is discussed in this course. For other tests refer page
98+ in the book “Introduction Quality and Reliability (2015) by
Renyan Jiang”
This test is developed by Crow LH (1974) and is based on the
power-law model given by equation When =1, the failure
process follows an HPP. As such, the test involves whether an
estimate of is significantly different from 1. Where M(t) is
commutative mean function
The null hypothesis is =1 and the alternative hypothesis is ≠1.

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 Tests with HPP Null Hypothesis
  
In this model, provides the following information:
◦ If =1 the failure arrivals follow a homogeneous Poisson process;
◦ If > 1, the system deteriorates with time; and
◦ if < 1, the system improves with time.
For one system on test, the maximum likelihood estimate of is

where n is the number of observed failures and T is the censored time, which can
be larger than or equal to tn. The test statistic 2n/β follows a chi-squared
distribution with the degree of freedom of 2n.
The rejection criterion for null hypothesis H0 is given by

Wednesday, 07 June 2017 22

 Test Example
Where
   is the inverse of the one-tailed probability of the chi-squared
distribution associated with probability p and degree of freedom k.
The data shown in Table 6.1 deal with failure times (in 1000 h) of a
repairable component in a manufacturing system.

Test the stationarity of the data in Table 6.1 using the Crow test.

Wednesday, 07 June 2017 23

 Test Example
We
   have 𝛽=0.9440 and 2n/=25:423. For significant level

i xi ti Ln(T/ti)
1 0.673 0.673 3.49267
2 0.983 1.656 2.59226
3 1.567 3.223 1.92635
4 2.349 5.572 1.37891
5 3.314 8.886 0.91219
6 1.786 10.672 0.72904
7 1.745 12.417 0.57760
8 2.234 14.651 0.41215
9 0.987 15.638 0.34696
10 1.756 17.394 0.24054
11 2.567 19.961 0.10288
12 2.163 22.124 0.00000
22.12400 12.71155
B 0.944023644
Wednesday, 07 June 2017 24
Thanks for your
attention