Mechanical Equipment Reliability Analysis: Case Study

In civil and mining industries, Wheel loaders are an important component and their cost capability at effective operation. The environmental and operational factors dramatically affect the performance of loaders. In many cases, failure data are often collected from multiple and distributed units in different operational conditions, which can introduce heterogeneity into the data. Part of such heterogeneity can be explained and isolated by the observable covariates, whose values and the way they can affect the item's reliability are known. However, some factors that may affect the item's reliability are typically unknown and lead to unobserved heterogeneity. These factors are categorized as unobserved covariates. In most reliability studies, the effect of unobserved covariates is neglected. This may lead to erroneous model selection for the time to failure of the item, as well as wrong conclusions and decisions. There is a lack of sufficient knowledge, theoretical background, and a systematic approach to model the unobserved covariate in reliability analysis. This paper aims to present a framework for reliability analysis in the presence of unobserved and observed covariates. The unobserved covariates will be analyzed using frailty models (Such as Mixed Proportional Hazard).A case will illustrate the application of the framework.