- Open Access
- Article
Evaluation of equivalent acceleration factors of repairable systems in a fleet: a process-average-based approach
by Renyan Jiang 
1, 2, Kunpeng Zhang 1,2 Xia Xu 2, 3 and Yu Cao 1, 2 
1 China International Science & Technology Cooperation Base for Laser Processing Robotics, Wenzhou University, Wenzhou 325035, China.
2 Zhejiang Provincial Innovation Center of Laser Intelligent Equipment Technology, Wenzhou, 325000, China.
3 Penta laser (Zhejiang) Co., Ltd., Wenzhou 325000, China.
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Journal of Engineering Research and Sciences, Volume 3, Issue 10, Page # 44-54, 2024; DOI: 10.55708/js0310005
Keywords: Repairable system, reliability modeling, MTBF, equivalent acceleration factor, fleet heterogeneity
Received: 30 August 2024, Revised: 14 October 2024, Accepted: 15 October 2024, Published Online: 24 October 2024
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Special Issue on Multidisciplinary Sciences and Advanced Technology 2024 & Section Biochemical Research Methods (BRM))
APA Style
Jiang, R., Zhang, K., Xu, X., & Cao, Y. (2024). Evaluation of equivalent acceleration factors of repairable systems in a fleet: A process-average-based approach. Journal of Engineering Research and Sciences, 3(10), 44-54. https://doi.org/10.55708/js0310005
Chicago/Turabian Style
Jiang, Renyan, Kunpeng Zhang, Xia Xu, and Yu Cao. “Evaluation of Equivalent Acceleration Factors of Repairable Systems in a Fleet: A Process-Average-Based Approach.” Journal of Engineering Research and Sciences 3, no. 10 (2024): 44-54. https://doi.org/10.55708/js0310005.
IEEE Style
R. Jiang, K. Zhang, X. Xu, and Y. Cao, “Evaluation of equivalent acceleration factors of repairable systems in a fleet: A process-average-based approach,” Journal of Engineering Research and Sciences, vol. 3, no. 10, pp. 44-54, 2024, doi: 10.55708/js0310005.
Research on repairable systems in a fleet is mainly concerned with modelling of the failure times using point processes. One important issue is to quantitatively evaluate the heterogeneity among systems, which is usually analyzed using frailty models. Recently, a fleet heterogeneity evaluation method is proposed in the literature. This method describes the heterogeneity with the relative dispersion of equivalent acceleration factors (EAFs) of systems, which is defined as the ratio of the mean times between failures (MTBFs) of a system and a reference system. A main drawback of this method is that the MTBFs of a specific system and the reference system are estimated at different times while the MTBF estimated at different time can be different. This paper aims to address this issue by proposing an improved method. The proposed method uses an “average process” as the reference process and estimates the MTBFs of systems and the reference system at a common time point. This leads to more robust MTBF estimates. Three datasets are analyzed to illustrate the proposed method and its superiority.
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