Bayesian reliability modeling and assessment solution for NC machine tools under small-sample data

Although Markov chain Monte Carlo(MCMC) algorithms are accurate, many factors may cause instability when they are utilized in reliability analysis; such instability makes these algorithms unsuitable for widespread engineering applications. Thus, a reliability modeling and assessment solution aimed at small-sample data of numerical control(NC) machine tools is proposed on the basis of Bayes theories. An expert-judgment process of fusing multi-source prior information is developed to obtain the Weibull parameters’ prior distributions and reduce the subjective bias of usual expert-judgment methods. The grid approximation method is applied to two-parameter Weibull distribution to derive the formulas for the parameters’ posterior distributions and solve the calculation difficulty of high-dimensional integration. The method is then applied to the real data of a type of NC machine tool to implement a reliability assessment and obtain the mean time between failures(MTBF). The relative error of the proposed method is 5.8020×10-4 compared with the MTBF obtained by the MCMC algorithm. This result indicates that the proposed method is as accurate as MCMC. The newly developed solution for reliability modeling and assessment of NC machine tools under small-sample data is easy, practical, and highly suitable for widespread application in the engineering field; in addition, the solution does not reduce accuracy.