Application of Ant Colony Algorithm in the Optimization of the Time Environmental Conversion Factor of the Reliability Models

Based upon the AMSAA model which has been widely used in engineering, a method of defining the time environmental conversion factor was proposed through optimization process, which made full used of the failure data from the same kind of products or the similar products in their development tests, and it made all the development test items into s few typical environment stress types in case the development test include more items. The ant colony algorithm is used in the optimization of the time environmental conversion factor of the AMSAA models. The steps of determining the optimal time environmental conversion factor are listed. And a practical engineering application example is illustrated. The result shows that the reliability evaluation result obtained from the presented method is closer to the practical reliability level. And this method offers one reasonable way for integrated reliability evaluation with the failure data in the stage of product development.