Equipment Failure Forecasting Based on Past Failure Performance and Development of Replacement Strategies

When only partial information is available about equipment failures (installation date and amount, as well as failure and replacement rates), data on sufficiently large number of yearly populations of the components can be combined, and estimation of model parameters may be possible. The parametric models may then be used for forecasting of the system's short term future failure and for formulation of replacement strategies. We employ the Weibull distribution and show how we estimate its parameters from past failure data. Using Monte Carlo simulations, it is possible to assess confidence ranges of the forecasted component performance data.