Some effective control chart procedures for reliability monitoring

Control charts are widely used for process monitoring in the manufacturing industry. Little research is available on their use to monitor the failure process of components or systems, which is important for equipment performance monitoring. Some Shewhart control charts, especially those for the number of defects, can be used for monitoring the number of failures per fixed interval; however, they are not effective especially when the failure frequency becomes small. A recent control scheme based on the cumulative quantity between observations of defects has been proposed which can be easily adopted to monitor the failure process for exponentially distributed inter-failure time. An investigation of its use for reliability monitoring is presented in this paper and the scheme can be easily extended to monitor inter-failure times that follow other distributions such as the Weibull distribution. Furthermore, the scheme is extended to the monitoring of time required to observe a fixed number of failures. The advantages of this scheme include the fact that the scheme does not require any subjective sample size, can be used for both high and low reliability items and can detect process improvement even in a high-reliability environment. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.