Modeling and evaluation of reliability and availability of industrial systems: Applications to parallel series and series parallel systems

With today´s highly reliable components, we are often unable to obtain a reasonable amount of test data under normal use condition. For this reason, accelerated tests method is the reasonable procedure to be applied. It is used to determine the reliability of a product in a short period of time by accelerating the use environment. Application of the method of accelerated tests can save cost that we used to pay for overcoming the dilemma of not being able to estimate failure rates by testing directly at use conditions. In the method of accelerated tests, acceleration factor is known or there exists a mathematical model which specifies the relationship between lifetime and reliability or failure. This model proves its value not only as a way of a validation model for classical reliability models existing in the literature, but more, as a quantifier of reliability gain resulting when replacing or modifying parts (cost-benefit analysis).