ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the terms and concepts needed to describe and evaluate product reliability. These include the reliability or survival function; the hazard and cumulative hazard functions; the failure rate and average failure rate (AFR); the renewal rate; the mean time to failure and the residual mean time to failure; and the well-known bathtub curve. In addition, we will look at the kinds of data that a reliability analyst typically obtains from laboratory testing or a customer environment (uncensored, right censored, and multicensored data). Less common kinds of data (left censored and truncated) are included for completeness.
