No abstract

This paper proposes a model selection framework for analysing the failure data of multiple repairable units when they are working in different operational and environmental conditions. The paper provides an approach for splitting the non‐homogeneous failure data set into homogeneous groups, based on their failure patterns and statistical trend tests. In addition, when the population includes units with an inadequate amount of failure data, the analysts tend to exclude those units from the analysis. A procedure is presented for modelling the reliability of a multiple repairable units under the influence of such a group to prevent parameter estimation error. We illustrate the implementation of the proposed model by applying it on 12 frequency converters in the Swedish railway system. The results of the case study show that the reliability model of multiple repairable units within a large fleet may consist of a mixture of different stochastic models, that is, the homogeneous Poisson process/renewal process, trend renewal process, non‐homogeneous Poisson process and branching Poisson processes. Therefore, relying only on a single model to represent the behaviour of the whole fleet may not be valid and may lead to wrong parameter estimation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Due to demand of new features and highly reliable software system, the software industries are speeding their up-gradations/add-ons in the software. The life of software is very short in the environment of perfect competition. Therefore the software developers have to come up with successive up gradations to survive. The reported bugs from the existing software and Features added to the software at frequent time intervals lead to complexity in the software system and add to the number of faults in the software. The developer of the software can lose on market share if it neglects the reported bugs and up gradation in the software and on the other hand a software company can lose its name and goodwill in the market if the reported bugs and functionalities added to the software lead to an increase in the number of faults in the software. To capture the effect of faults due to existing software and generated in the software due to add-ons at various points in time, we develop a multi up-gradation, multi release software reliability model. This model uniquely identifies the faults left in the software when it is in operational phase during the testing of the new code i.e. developed while adding new features to the existing software. Due to complexity and incomplete understanding of the software, the testing team may not be able to remove/correct the fault perfectly on observation/detection of a failure and the original fault may remain resulting in the phenomenon known as imperfect debugging, or get replaced by another fault causing error generation The model developed is validated on real data sets with software which has been released in the market with new features four times.