Reliability

Reliability, as an endeavor for equipment to function without failure. It is used in the industry for production and product improvement. Next to other methods, like Six Sigma.

Statistics has various usages. I remember my teacher, doc. Maroš describing, how industrial statistics differs to for example statistics used in medicine or economy. We can control a lot. We can make something actually happen. In the previous fields, we often have to be happy with what we get.

There are many topics in reliability, let me examine some:

Risk Analysis and Management:

Risk analysis in the management context is the art of intruding in the prepared project plan and pulling to everyone's dissatisfaction the break and saying "Wait. What if something goes wrong? And what will be the consequences, if it does?". For what happens, if the management includes some data that should not be added please feel welcomed to read our article (Schwarzenegger, R., Quigley, J., & Walls, L., 2021). 

RAMS 2020 was one of the latest main conferences in reliability. I am referring to this conference to write about the developments in this area and show an application. In risk analysis and management, there were various talks on this topic. Reaching from a failure time analysis of the Boeing 737 MAX or making a risk assessment and mitigation strategies of the active lower limb exoskeleton to investigating how systems fail.

Life data analysis

Or also Weibull analysis, since the Weibull distribution is the golden standard for lifetime distribution. The analysis aims to predict the lifetime of a product. In the case of a parametric approach, we infer the parameters of the proposed distribution. If you like to read more, you are cordially invited to read my Master's thesis ;)

RAMS 2020 life data analysis was in my view surprisingly practically oriented on specific products with applications on heat exchangers, gyroscopes, gearboxes and army equipment.

Warranty Data Analysis

And yes please, dear companies. Don't make products only durable, if it is cheaper than dealing with all the warranty claims. There can be a calculation, when the break-even point is achieved. But a good reputation is also something, one should account for. Similarly like in life data analysis, the failure distribution is estimated. The central goal remains to predict the number of products being returned. Hopefully for this reason, there were no dedicated papers on this topic presented in the RAMS 2020 conference.

Reliability Growth Analysis

Is the improvement of a product over a period of time. It doesn't need to be only concerning physical mechanical products. Software topics are also in high demand. The improvement of software in the reliability growth sense is done via debugging. The RAMS2020 section of reliability growth analysis was led in a Bayesian sentiment.

Whether it was just the Bayesian approach of a hierarchical approach.

From the European view, ESREL being a worthwhile conference.

Some talk discussing oil and gas. Actually a lot of talks discussing oil and gas. This might be due to my small bias in choosing rather engineering related talks. From the Industrial perspective, Eni was concerned about safety of its drills and of course the whole Norwegian presenting assembly. I feel that the society wants to drill its oil, but at the same time has deep concerns about the possibility of an accident. And this might lead to a lot of work being produced