A New Process Performance Index for the Weibull Distribution with a Type-I Hybrid Censoring Scheme

Abstract

A new life performance index is proposed for evaluating the quality of lifetime products. The maximum likelihood estimation method and the Bayesian approaches using informative and non-informative prior distributions are utilized to infer the parameters of the Weibull distribution and the proposed new life performance index under a Type-I hybrid censoring scheme. Monte Carlo simulation results show that two Bayesian approaches outperform the maximum likelihood estimation method in terms of the measures of relative bias, relative mean square error, and coverage probability for the point and confidence interval estimators, respectively. The Bayesian approach using a non-informative prior distribution is recommended if the knowledge of setting up the hyper-parameters in the informative prior distribution is not available. Two real data sets are provided for illustration.

Keywords

• life performance index
• maximum likelihood estimation
• Bayesian estimation
• Monte Carlo simulation