Reliability assessment of mechatronic systems: operating field data analysis

The reliability analysis of complex mechatronic systems is a very important engineering issue, in order to guarantee their functional behavior. We propose the evaluation of mechatronic systems reliability using censored data for operating field for different technologies, e.g. mechanics, electronics, and software. For ultra reliable system for which we have little data, we use an estimation method, stochastic expectation maximization (SEM), to increase the evaluation accuracy. The SEM method is used to estimate the reliability parameters with better accuracy than with maximization likelihood method.