Product reliability oriented design scheme of control chart based on the convergent CEV for censored characteristics

Since the censored characteristics are unmonitored effectively in the manufacturing process, the produced product tends to have an unexpected high infant failure rate. Thus, this paper analyzes the associated relationship between product reliability and censored quality characteristics in manufacturing process firstly, and the dynamic and universal control demands for censored characteristics are presented. In view that traditional CEV-based control charts are usually confined to some specific types when dealing with censored characteristics, which greatly restrict the wide application of censored control charts in the high-quality manufacturing process, the convergent CEV technique based on the principle of asymptotic reduction is proposed to be better applied in the analysis of censored characteristics. And novel design procedures and simple but practical performance indicator in the form of the most dangerous alarm distance for censored characteristics of Weibull distribution are put forward. Finally, the validity of the proposed method is verified by a case study of monitoring a censored characteristic relative to lifetime of some aeronautical bearings, and the result proves that the sensitivity of the proposed control chart increased 79.96% compared to traditional CEV chart and is proved to be applicable to monitoring mixed censored characteristics affecting product reliability in manufacturing process. © 2015 Yihai He et al.