Panlop Zeephongsekul

In reliability and related disciplines, comparing reliability functions of two (or more) aging processes is a crucial step in the process of determining reliability and understanding an aging process. The aim of this paper is to propose a non parametric statistical methodology to compare two populations based on their mean residual life function and expected inactivity time function. We introduce some novel hypothesis testing procedures that involve both Cramér–von Mises- and Kolmogorov–Smirnov-type test statistics and their decision rules are constructed based on the asymptotic distributions of these test statistics and bootstrapping method. We study the practical behavior of the proposed testing procedures extensively through simulations. The results reveal that the proposed hypothesis testing procedures perform efficiently in identifying small and large differences. Two real-life examples are discussed to demonstrate the practical utility of the tests.

This paper presents a new multivariate process capability index (MPCI) which is based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and is dependent on a parameter which can take on any real number. This MPCI generalises some existing multivariate indices based on PCA proposed by several authors when or . One of the key contributions of this paper is to show that there is a direct correspondence between this MPCI and process yield for a unique value of . This result is used to establish a relationship between the capability status of the process and to show that under some mild conditions, the estimators of this MPCI is consistent and converge to a normal distribution. This is then applied to perform tests of statistical hypotheses and in determining sample sizes. Several numerical examples are presented with the objective of illustrating the procedures and demonstrating how they can be applied to determine the viability and capacity of different manufacturing processes.

Several measures of process yield, defined on univariate and multivariate normal process characteristics, have been introduced and studied by several authors. These measures supplement several well-known Process Capacity Indices (PCI) used widely in assessing the quality of products before being released into the marketplace. In this paper, we generalise these yield indices to the location-scale family of distributions which includes the normal distribution as one of its member. One of the key contributions of this paper is to demonstrate that under appropriate conditions, these indices converge in distribution to a normal distribution. Several numerical examples will be used to illustrate our procedures and show how they can be applied to perform statistical inferences on process capability.