Application of modern reliability database techniques to military system data

This paper focuses on analysis techniques of modern reliability databases, with an application to military system data. The analysis of military system data base consists of the following steps: clean the data and perform operation on it in order to obtain good estimators; present simple plots of data; analyze the data with statistical and probabilistic methods. Each step is dealt with separately and the main results are presented. Competing risks theory is advocated as the mathematical support for the analysis. The general framework of competing risks theory is presented together with simple independent and dependent competing risks models available in literature. These models are used to identify the reliability and maintenance indicators required by the operating personnel. Model selection is based on graphical interpretation of plotted data.