Manufacturers increasingly integrate the suppliers of their production equipment into their maintenance activities in order to improve the reliability and availability of their machinery. This forces suppliers to increase their knowledge of the failure behavior of their products. However, the failure data delivered to them by their customers often lacks information about the operational conditions of the machine tools. Since these operational conditions are highly variable and have a large impact on the reliability of the machines, it is important to gain knowledge of them. The approach being presented uses the Mixed Weibull and the Cumulative Damage models to estimate the different operational conditions from mixed failure data and uses field data collected from a machine tool component.

Key Words: Life Data Analysis, R&M Applications in Manufacturing, Reliability Modeling

Patrick Werner
wbk Institute of Production Science, Universitt Karlsruhe (TH)
Germany