The Misconception and Risk of Using MTBF as a Reliability Indicator for Industry Management
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-94-6463-038-1_30How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- MTBF; MTTF; Reliability Indicator; Misconception
- Abstract
MTBF (Mean Time between Failure) is perhaps the most common indicator for reliability level used in the industries. This paper examines the statistical foundation of this indicator and investigates the limitation and risk of using it. Examples are provided to demonstrate the errors when misusing the MTBF. The examination is not trivial if the error is found significant. Some misconceptions on the MTBF are also discussed to raise the awareness of using this indicator correctly in the paper. Furthermore, the paper points out some results from the demonstration in the paper might be opposite to our intuition. Industrial engineers should avoid to make decision according to those unverified intuition. Upon the limitation and problems, the paper furthermore proposes some approaches to mitigate the limitation and the problem of the use of the MTBF.
- Copyright
- © 2023 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Fuqing Yuan AU - Jinmei Lu PY - 2022 DA - 2022/12/15 TI - The Misconception and Risk of Using MTBF as a Reliability Indicator for Industry Management BT - Proceedings of the 2022 3rd International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management (ICMSEM 2022) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 324 EP - 332 SN - 2589-4943 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-038-1_30 DO - 10.2991/978-94-6463-038-1_30 ID - Yuan2022 ER -