A Description of Expected Failure Rates of Newly Acquired Components Prior to Steady State

A study of the effects on the population failure rate of component failures during the period of transition to steady state is presented. Comparisons between the simulated failure rates and the system failure rate predicted under the present Air Force assumption on an underlying Poisson process are accomplished for various MTBFs and parameters of the Weibull distribution. The decreasing hazard, constant hazard, and increasing hazard functions are studied and presented. The study was performed as a simulation of the transition period using the GASP 2 package developed by Pritsker and Kiviat. Such a simulation package greatly simplifies the required programs necessary to be written. The computer program used in this study is included as part of this paper.