A Procedure to Test Tolerance and Faulty States for Measurement Instrumentation

The present paper proposes a procedure in order to test the operating state and faulty occurrences for measurement instrumentation. The task of a calibration process is to estimate the availability of the tested instrument, but the inevitable uncertainty associated with the same calibration could affect the measurement results, so entailing wrong decisions. The working state of a measurement system may be in three possible conditions: in-tolerance, out-of-tolerance or in a faulty status. The proposed model allows taking into account the influence of calibration process uncertainty on making a decision about the operating state of instrumentation. The suggested approach, first, gets the probability of wrong decision, then, by using the Dempster-Shafer theory, it provides the degree of belief and plausibility about the possible alternatives. So, confidence intervals give a measure of the most plausible decision and information on a possible faulty state condition. Purpose of paper is to get a support to the calibration procedures in order to qualify the instrumentation management and its maintainability