A fuzzy logic based approach to reliability improvement estimation during product development

During early stages of product development process, a vast amount of knowledge and information is generated. However, most of it is subjective (imprecise) in nature and remains unutilized. This paper presents a formal structure for capturing this information and knowledge and utilizing it in reliability improvement estimation. The information is extracted as improvement indices from various design tools, experiments, and design review records and treated as fuzzy numbers or linguistic variables. Fuzzy reasoning method is used to combine and quantify the subjective information to map their impact on product reliability. The crisp output of the fuzzy reasoning process is treated as new evidence and incorporated into a Bayesian framework to update the reliability estimates. A case example is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach. q 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.