Evaluation of operational reliability from ground test data

This paper presents the application of Bayesian inference to evaluate the system operational reliability from ground test data. The hazard functions for ground test and field operation are assumed to be proportional to each other and they are interrelated by a correlation factor. By developing a modified model and introducing an iterating procedure, the marginal maximum likelihood method is used to find the estimates of correlation factor and the parameters of prior distribution. The estimate of system operation failure rate is then obtained by the estimate of posterior mean. Finally, a numerical example is given and it is shown that the proposed technique is valuable for practical application.