Reliability Analysis of Non-Constant-Size Part Populations in Design for Remanufacture

Abstract

Remanufacture offers significant economic and ecological advantages over other end-of-life options for appropriate products. The goal of this research is to estimate replacement requirements of parts in systems that are remanufactured. In our previous work, a novel repairable-system reliability model that allows system modifications was developed to describe a population of systems that are remanufactured. In this paper, the reliability model is modified to accommodate changes to the population size, while the population is in service, to better describe actual processes. The effects of two types of disturbances to population size, pulse and continuous, on the replacement rate behavior are studied. Analysis of actual industrial data is presented as an example of population replacement under continuous disturbance. This example confirms that a simulation using the reliability model described in this paper yields an estimate for replacement rate with acceptable error bound. [S1050-0472(00)00302-0]