Belief Reliability Evaluation with Limited Time-to-Failure Data under Uncertain Right Censoring

Uncertain right censoring which describes the situation that the censoring settings of test units are unrelated to their failure time often occurs in the life testing. Besides, in the reliability evaluations using the collected time-to-failure data from the practical life testing, the small-sample situation is common since the test resources are usually limited. Under such situation, the large-sample based probability theory is not appropriate anymore to evaluate reliability. To address such problem, based on a new theory of reliability-belief reliability theory, the reliability evaluation is conducted to cope with the limited censored time-to-failure data under uncertain right censoring, where the uncertain measure is employed. Firstly, a brief introduction to the belief reliability theory is conducted. Then, the lifetime model and belief reliability evaluation under the uncertain measure are presented, and the corresponding statistics method for unknown parameter estimation is provided with objective measures. Finally, a simulation study is used to illustrate the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can achieve more accurate and concrete reliability evaluation results with limited right-censored time-to-failure data, compared to the probability reliability method.