Trend testing for complex repairable systems

In an earlier paper[1] trend testing has been considered in the context of simple reliability/survival applications. One of the main conclusions of that paper suggested that the very common procedure in reliability tendency to fit lifetime distributions to reliability/maintenance data might be occasionally invalid. Furthermore, the paper presented the appropriate statistical methods to assess the validity (or otherwise) of such a procedure, and detailed the calculation of the ROCOF curves and the Laplace test for trend. Finally, the use of these two techniques was demonstrated by means of a practical, reliability example.

This paper extends the ideas discussed...