Determining Optimal Reliability Targets: Engineering Analysis and Simulation of Product Validation Costs and Warranty Data

This book presents a methodology to minimize the life cycle cost of a product based on the decision variables controlled by a reliability/quality professional during a product development process. The relationship between product quality and product reliability continues to be a gray area due to the different nature of failures attributed to those two categories and a general lack of studies establishing the effect of product validation activities on future field failures. The methodology proposed in this book incorporates all product dependability-related activities into a comprehensive probabilistic cost model that enables minimization of the product?s life cycle cost. The major model inputs include the cost of ownership of test equipment, forecasted cost of warranty returns, and environmental test parameters of a product validation program. This work will provide reliability professionals with a methodology to evaluate the efficiency of a product validation program from a life cycle cost point of view, and ultimately minimize that cost by optimizing the test flow of the product validation process.