Quantification of organizational influences on failure rate: A Bayesian approach

This paper studies the organizational influences on failure rates. The failure rate model in MIL-HDBK-217F is extended to include organizational factors, and a Bayesian approach is proposed to quantify the organizational influences. In contrast to most explicit organizational models, this paper focuses on extracting information from failure rate data. The proposed Bayesian approach, however, can be combined with the explicit models by using their results as prior information, hence obtain more rigorous result. A numerical example is included to illustrate the model and approach.