The reliability of the computer numerical control (CNC) system affects its processing performance and is a major concern in the manufacturing industry today. However, existing reliability models to assess the reliability of the CNC system often exhibit relatively large errors due to inadequate treatment of small samples. In order to get around the constraint of limited lifetime failure data and take full advantage of existing reliability parameters in traditional reliability models, a multisource information fusion-based reliability model grounded on Bayesian inference is proposed to deal with the small sample size. The prior distributions are derived by using the probability encoding method and conjugate distribution based on the idea of multisource information fusion. Then, using the Jensen–Shannon divergence (JSD) to measure the similarity between prior information and field observation data, a constrained optimization problem is established to determine the respective weight of prior information and field observation data. Finally, by conducting the reliability analysis of repairable CNC systems, the validity of the proposed model and its prior distribution derivation method are verified.

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