Group judgment of relationship between product reliability and quality characteristics based on Bayesian theory and expert’s experience

The importance of product reliability attracts increasing attentions from manufacturers, as it has become a vital factor to success in the current competitive world. Reliability can be achieved throughout lifecycle of product among which design stage has acquired large amounts of research achievements. However, few have been done on the assurance of reliability in product manufacturing stage, except in semiconductor manufacturing industry. The difficulty lies in the identification of the relationship between product reliability indices and its quality characteristics, which is essential for the control of the product reliability in manufacturing stage. In this paper, we present a method of combining a group of experts in help to identify the accurate relationship, according to their experiences. The method, based on Bayesian theory, incorporates experts’ experiences with quantitative identification process. The proposed method can be used in various areas of manufacturing as it is a general methodology to identify the relationship between the product reliability indices and quality characteristics.