Weibull Analysis

Abstract

The problem of estimating the hazard rate of a complex system, either of equipment or a biological organism, knowing only that its graph is convex, i.e., initially decreasing and terminally increasing, is both common and difficult. There have been several attempts to introduce multiparameter models in which the hazard rate exhibits such behavior. But these models have often required such large datasets in order to estimate all the parameters that their usefulness has been limited to large samples, as may sometimes be obtained in medical trials but virtually never arise in engineering testing. Because of the paucity of data in engineering applications such multiparameter models are not often favored.