• Communications for Statistical Applications and Methods
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.555-562
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• 2016

Interval censored data often occur in an observational study where the subject is followed periodically. Instead of observing an exact failure time, two inspection times that include it are available. There are several methods to analyze interval censored failure time data (Sun, 2006). However, in the presence of competing risks, few methods have been suggested to estimate covariate effect on interval censored competing risk data. A sub-distribution hazard model is a commonly used regression model because it has one-to-one correspondence with a cumulative incidence function. Alternatively, Klein and Andersen (2005) proposed a pseudo-value approach that directly uses the cumulative incidence function. In this paper, we consider an extension of the pseudo-value approach into the interval censored data to estimate regression coefficients. The pseudo-values generated from the estimated cumulative incidence function then become response variables in a generalized estimating equation. Simulation studies show that the suggested method performs well in several situations and an HIV-AIDS cohort study is analyzed as a real data example.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.816-822
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• 2000

In the core of the nuclear power plant of PWR, several cases of fuel failure by unknown causes have been experienced for various fuel types. From the common features of the failure pattern, failure lead time, flow conditions, and flow induced vibration characteristics in nuclear fuel bundles, it is deduced that the fretting wear failure of the fuel rod at the spacer grid position is due to the fluidelastic vibration. In the past, fluidelastic vibration was simulated by quasi -static semi-analytical model, so called the static model, which could not account for the interaction between the rods within a bundle. To overcome this defect and to provide for more flexibilities applicable to the fuel bundle, Tanaka's unsteady model was modified to accomodate the geometrical differences and governing parameter changes during the operations such as the number of rods, pitch to diameter ratio (P/D), spring force, damping coefficient, etc. The critical velocity was calculated by solving the governing equations with the MATLAB code. A comparison between the estimated critical velocity and the test result shows a good agreement. Finally, the level of decrease of the critical velocity due to the reduction in the spring force and reduced damping coefficient due to the radiation exposure is also estimated.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.1-36
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• 2012

Service failure is one of the major reasons for customer defection. As the business environment gets tougher and more competitive, a single service failure might bring about fatal consequences to a service provider or a firm. Sometimes a failure won't end up with an unsatisfied customer's simple complaining but with a wide-spread animosity against the service provider or the firm, leading to a threat to the firm's survival itself in the society. Therefore, we are in need of comprehensive understandings of complainants' attitudes and behaviors toward service failures and firm's recovery efforts. Even though a failure itself couldn't be fixed completely, marketers should repair the mind and heart of unsatisfied customers, which can be regarded as an successful recovery strategy in the end. As the outcome of recovery efforts exerted by service providers or firms, recovery of the relationship between customer and service provider need to put on the top in the recovery goal list. With these motivations, the study investigates how service failure and recovery makes the changes in dynamics of fundamental elements of customer-firm relationship, such as customer affection, customer trust and loyalty intention by comparing two time points, before the service failure and after the recovery, focusing on the effects of recovery satisfaction and the failure severity. We adopted La & Choi (2012)'s framework for development of the research model that was based on the previous research stream like Yim et al. (2008) and Thomson et al. (2005). The pivotal background theories of the model are mainly from relationship marketing and social relationships of social psychology. For example, Love, Emotional attachment, Intimacy, and Equity theories regarding human relationships were reviewed. As the results, when recovery satisfaction is high, customer affection and customer trust that were established before the service failure are carried over to the future after the recovery. However, when recovery satisfaction is low, customer-firm relationship that had already established in the past are not carried over but broken up. Regardless of the degree of recovery satisfaction, once a failure occurs loyalty intention is not carried over to the future and the impact of customer trust on loyalty intention becomes stronger. Such changes imply that customers become more prudent and more risk-aversive than the time prior to service failure. The impact of severity of failure on customer affection and customer trust matters only when recovery satisfaction is low. When recovery satisfaction is high, customer affection and customer trust become severity-proof. Interestingly, regardless of the degree of recovery satisfaction, failure severity has a significant negative influence on loyalty intention. Loyalty intention is the most fragile target when a service failure occurs no matter how severe the failure criticality is. Consequently, the ultimate goal of service recovery should be the restoration of customer-firm relationship and recovery of customer trust should be the primary objective to accomplish for a successful recovery performance. Especially when failure severity is high, service recovery should be perceived highly satisfied by the complainants because failure severity matters more when recovery satisfaction is low. Marketers can implement recovery strategies to enhance emotional appeals as well as fair treatments since the both impacts of affection and trust on loyalty intention are significant. In the case of high severity of failure, recovery efforts should be exerted to overreach customer expectation, designed to directly repair customer trust and elaborately designed in the focus of customer-firm communications during the interactional recovery process to affect customer trust rebuilding indirectly. Because it is a longer and harder way to rebuild customer-firm relationship for high severity cases, low recovery satisfaction cannot guarantee customer retention. To prevent customer defection due to service failure of high severity, unexpected rewards as a recovery will be likely to be useful since those will lead to customer delight or customer gratitude toward the service firm. Based on the results of analyses, theoretical and managerial implications are presented. Limitations and future research ideas are also discussed.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.386-390
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• 2007

At recent times, an essential issue in the replacement of the old analogue I&C to computer-based digital systems in nuclear power plants becomes the quantitative software reliability assessment. Software reliability models have been successfully applied to many industrial applications, but have the unfortunate drawback of requiring data from which one can formulate a model. Software that is developed for safety critical applications is frequently unable to produce such data for at least two reasons. First, the software is frequently one-of-a-kind, and second, it rarely fails. Safety critical software is normally expected to pass every unit test producing precious little failure data. The basic premise of the rare events approach is that well-tested software does not fail under normal routine and input signals, which means that failures must be triggered by unusual input data and computer states. The failure data found under the reasonable testing cases and testing time for these conditions should be considered for the quantitative reliability assessment. We presented the quantitative reliability assessment methodology of safety critical software for rare failure cases in this paper.

• Journal of the Korean Statistical Society
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.89-98
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• 2001

Brown and Proschan(1983) introduced a model for imperfect repair. At each failure of a device, with probability p, it is repaired completely or replaced with a new device(perfect repair), and with probability 1-p, it is returned to the functioning state, but it is only recovered to its condition just prior to failure(imperfect repair or minimal repair). In this paper, we limit the number of consecutive minimal repairs by n. We find some useful properties about $\mu$$_{k}$, the expected time between the k-th and the (k+1)-st repair under he assumption that only minimal repairs are performed. Then, we assign cost to each repair and find the value of n which minimized the long-run average cost for a fixed p under the condition that the life distribution F os the device is DMRL.L.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Railway
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• v.9 no.5 s.36
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• pp.606-611
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• 2006

This paper presents a procedure and an analysis method to evaluate reliability of the Korea high-speed train. The rolling stock system is divided into 6 sub-systems and each subsystem is classified into sub-assemblies. Functional analysis has been conducted to draw reliability block diagrams for the sub-systems. First, failure rates has been calculated for each sub-assembly from the failure data obtained during commissioning tests. Then a reliability block diagram is used to evaluate the MKBF(Mean Kilometers Before Failure) of the sub-systems. Activities to increase reliability have been carried out throughout the test runs and analysis results show that the reliability of the rolling stock system is gradually growing in time.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.325-336
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• 2018

Deformation of rock masses is not only related to rock itself, but also related to discontinuities, the latter maybe greater. Study on crack propagation at discontinuities is important to reveal the damage law of rock masses. DDARF is a discontinuous deformation analysis method for rock failure and some modified algorithms are proposed in this study. Firstly, coupled modeling methods of AutoCAD-DDARF and ANSYS-DDARF are introduced, which could improve the modeling efficiency of DDARF compared to its original program. Secondly, a convergence criterion for automatically judging the computation equilibrium is established, it could overcome subjective drawbacks of ending one calculation by time steps. Lastly but not the least, relationship between the super relaxation factor and the calculation convergence is analyzed, and reasonable value range of the super relaxation factor is obtained. Based on these above modified programs, influences on crack propagation of joint angle, joint parameters and geo-stresses' side pressure are studied.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.49-54
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• 2005

Recently, the reliability are applied for many industrial products, and many products are required to guarantee in quality and in performance. The purpose of this paper is to present some of reliability prediction methodologies using failure rate database for machinery parts that are applicable to machine tools. VDI Turret, which is core component of the NC Lathe, was chosen as the target of the reliability prediction. The results of reliability prediction has shown the failure rate, MTBF(Mean Time Between Failure), and reliability of the VDI Turret. It is expected that proposed methodologies will be applicable to prediction of reliability for other components of machine tools.

• Journal of Applied Reliability
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.47-56
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• 2012

Reliability demonstration tests with zero-failure acceptance criterion are most commonly used in the field of reliability application since they require fewer test samples and less test time compared to other test methods that guarantee the same reliability with a given confidence level. For products with lognormal lifetime distribution, an economic zero-failure test plan is developed that minimizes the total cost related to perform a life test to guarantee a specified reliability of a product with a given confidence level. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the use of the proposed test plan.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers P
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• v.65 no.3
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• pp.199-203
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• 2016

The cost needed to managing equipment is constantly increasing because of increase of power equipment. The regulations such as PAS 55 and ISO 55000 were enacted to manage equipment assets. The advanced management methods such as real-time monitoring, condition evaluation, and health indices are avalable in generation system, transmission system, and substation transformers. However, These methods can not be applied to distribution equipment because of a lot of equipment. Therefore reliability assessment is very important in case of distribution equipment. In this paper, failure rates are extracted considering characteristics of regions, and which are the essential factors to reliability evaluation.