Abstract
Traditional reliability analysis methods often assume that a manufactured product will be used on a continuous basis. However, many products are used by customers on an intermittent basis. Furthermore, the amount of use may vary across customers. This article analyzes the implications of this variation in usage on the field reliability performance of a product having a constant failure rate. Two cases are considered, one in which customer usage follows a uniform distribution and one in which it follows a beta distribution. Five measures of reliability are evaluated for each case, and for each case closed-form expressions are derived for all five measures. Numerical examples are provided, analyzed, and compared to traditional models of reliability performance. The key result is that an intermittently used product having a constant failure rate may generate field failure data that demonstrates decreasing failure rate behaviour.
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