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Fuzzy evaluation of product reliability based on ratio-based lifetime performance index

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Abstract

In highly-competitive markets, product quality is a critical element of sustainable development for manufacturing enterprises. The pursuit of quality is in essence a commitment to meeting the needs and expectations of customers. Firms often express customer needs in terms of quality characteristics in order to evaluate, monitor, and improve process performance. Reliability is an important quality characteristic. Specifically, reliability is the probability that a product will function as intended and will not malfunction within a certain period of time under certain operating conditions. Clearly, reliability influences the final evaluation made by customers of product quality. Since reliability is a time-oriented quality characteristic, it follows an exponential distribution. The performance standard for most quality indices is 1. To bring evaluation of reliability in line with convention, we propose ratio-based lifetime performance index (RLPI) \(\theta_{L}\). However, time-oriented data are continuous random variables, which implies that the observed values of the data are not precise. Furthermore, the performance of a product in various aspects inevitably declines over time. Clearly, longer product lifetime is not always better; it depends on the type of product. We therefore propose a two-tailed fuzzy statistical test for the RLPI \(\theta_{L}\) to assist manufacturing enterprises in making more accurate evaluations of product reliability. An illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the practical applicability of our proposed approach.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Editor and three anonymous referees for their constructive comments and careful reading, which significantly improved the presentation of this paper. The earlier version of this paper was presented at the 26th ISSAT International Conference on Reliability and Quality in Design (RQD 2021), August 5-7, 2021.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung, 41170, Taiwan, ROC

    Kuen-Suan Chen & Chun-Min Yu

  2. Department of Business Administration, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taichung, 41349, Taiwan, ROC

    Kuen-Suan Chen

  3. Institute of Innovation and Circular Economy, Asia University, Taichung, 41354, Taiwan, ROC

    Kuen-Suan Chen

  4. Department of Intelligent Production Engineering, National Taichung University of Science and Technology, No. 129, Sec. 3, Sanmin Rd., North Dist., Taichung, 40401, Taiwan, ROC

    Tsang-Chuan Chang

  5. Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, 300, Taiwan, ROC

    Hsuan-Yu Chen

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  1. Kuen-Suan Chen
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Correspondence to Tsang-Chuan Chang.

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Chen, KS., Yu, CM., Chang, TC. et al. Fuzzy evaluation of product reliability based on ratio-based lifetime performance index. Ann Oper Res (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-022-04988-7

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