This paper focuses on how modem data mining can be integrated with real-time relational databases and commercial data warehouses to improve reliability in real-time. An important Issue for many manufacturers is the development of relational databases that link key product attributes with real-time process parameters. Helpful data for key product attributes in manufacturing may be derived from destructive reliability testing. Destructive samples are taken at periodic time intervals during manufacturing, which might create a long time-gap between key product attributes and real-time process data. A case study is briefly summarized for the medium density fiberboard (MDF) industry. MDF is a wood composite that is used extensively by the home building and furniture manufacturing industries around the world. The cost of unacceptable MDF was as large as 5% to 10% of total manufacturing costs. Prevention can result In millions of US dollars saved by using better Information systems.

An optimization of the M/M/1 queue with impatient customers is studied. The impatient customer does not enter the system if his or her virtual waiting time exceeds the threshold K ＞ 0. After assigning three costs to the system, a cost proportional to the virtual waiting time, a penalty to each impatient customer, and also a penalty to each unit of the idle period of the server, we show that there exists a threshold K which minimizes the long-run average cost per unit time.

This paper introduces the joint structural importance of two components in a coherent system. Some relationships between joint structural importance and marginal structural importance are presented. It is shown that the sign of Joint structural importance can be determined, in advance, without computation in some special structures. The joint structural importance of two components in some series-parallel and parallel-series systems are established. Some practical examples are presented to elucidate some of the derived results.

In the traditional life testing model, it is assumed that a certain number of identical items are tested under identical condition. This is due to statistical rather than practical considerations. The proportional hazards model can be used to develop a realistic approach to determine the performance of an item. That is also capable of modeling the failure rates of accelerated life testing when the covariates are applied stresses. The proportional hazards model is typically applied for a group of items to assess the importance of factors that may influence the reliability of an item. In this paper we considered the interarrival times of an item rather than the time to first failure for grouped items and provided the availability estimation for the determination of maintenance policy and overhaul time. In order to demonstrate the proposed approach, an example is presented.

In this paper, we obtain an explicit formula of the Laplace transform of the forward recurrence time at finite time t > 0 in an alternating renewal process, by adopting a Markovian approach. As a consequence, we obtain the first two moments of the forward recurrence time.