A New Method to Determine the Reliability Comparability for Products, Components, and Systems in Reliability Testing

A method is proposed in this paper to determine whether a product, a component, or a system in reliability life testing has a longer lifetime than the other. We propose two indices to compare reliability. The comparison is also distribution-free; i.e., it does not require the assumption on the lifetime distributions. A comparability index that is derived by integrating the weighted difference between the reliability functions of the two groups under comparison is named the "Better or Worse" (BOW) index. The second comparability index that is derived by calculating the overlapping area under the two distributions in comparison is named "Reliability Comparability" (RC) to quantify the degree of similarity between the two distributions. These two new indices are compared with the conventional methods currently used in the IC industries. Practical applications in lifetime-type reliability comparison are also illustrated in this paper