Monitoring the Weibull shape parameter under progressive censoring in presence of independent competing risks

Abstract

In this paper, monitoring the Weibull shape parameter arising from progressively censored competing risks data is investigated. The competing risks are assumed to be independent and not identically distributed from the Weibull distributions with different shape and scale parameters. Both the shape parameters can be monitored separately by the proposed control charts using censored and predicted observations. We also introduced a control chart for monitoring both shape parameters simultaneously to detect possible shifts in both opposite and the same directions. In addition, the problem of mask data is discussed and an efficient prediction method is proposed. The behavior of the average run length with and without mask data is investigated through extensive simulations. Furthermore, the effects of sample size, number of failures due to each risk, and censoring scheme on the charts' performance are also studied. Finally, an illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed control charts by investigating a real data set of the failure times of two-component ARC-1 VHF communication transmitter receivers of a single commercial airline. Although this data set has been widely investigated in reliability analysis studies, this is the first time it has been analyzed in a statistical process monitoring setting.