IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 52, NO. 1, MARCH 2003 125
A Critical Look at the Bathtub Curve
Georgia-Ann Klutke, Peter C. Kiessler, and M. A. Wortman
Abstract—
This paper addresses some of the fundamental as-sumptions underlying the bathtub curve. It is shown to be unlikelythat any practical hazard function is decreasing near zero. Greatcare should be taken in interpreting the hazard function, particu-larly in applying quality-control practices, such as burn-in or en-vironmental-stress-screeing to manufactured products.
Index Terms—
Bathtub curve, burn-in, hazard function, infantmortality, mixture of distributions.
A
CRONYMS
1
Cdf cumulative distribution functionESS environmental stress screeninghzf hazard functionIFR increasing hazard (failure) ratepdf probability density functionSf survivor function.N
OTATION
pdf of time to failure: inflection points of hzf of time to failurecompact parameter space for mixture of distribu-tionselement of probability measure on, Cdfs of time to failureSfs of time to failure.I. I
NTRODUCTION
A
FUNDAMENTALtenetofreliabilitytheoryisthatthehzf displays a “bathtub shape.”The origins of this curve are unclear; it appears in actuariallife-table analysis as long ago as 1693 [6]. The bathtub curveis described in nearly every standard reliability text, e.g., [2],[3], [7], [13], [15]–[19]. The curve represents the idea that the
operationofapopulationofdevicescanbeviewedascomprisedof 3 distinct periods:
Manuscript received February 24, 2001; revised June 12, 2001 and August7, 2001. This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundationthrough Grants DMI-9713947, DMI-9726852, and DMI-9900368. ResponsibleEditor: J. A. Nachlas.G.-A. Klutke and M. A. Wortman are with the Department of Industrial En-gineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843 USA (e-mail:Klutke@tamu.edu, Wortman@tamu.edu).P. C. Kiessler is with the Department of Mathematical Sciences, ClemsonUniversity, Clemson, SC 29634 USA (e-mail: Kiesslp@clemson.edu).Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TR.2002.804492
1
The singular and plural of an acronym are always spelled the same.
• an“earlyfailure”(burn-in)period,wherethehzfdecreasesover time,• a “random failure” (useful life) period, where the hzf isconstant over time,• a “wear-out” period, where the hzf increases over time.The bathtub curve occupies a place of considerable impor-tance in reliability practice, particularly in justifying burn-instrategies for improving system reliability. This paper exposessome of the limitations of the traditional bathtub curve, andshows that a bathtub-shaped hzf cannot rigorously agree with asimple bi-modal lifetime density. Thus, the value of the bathtubcurve in characterizing infant mortalities is questionable. Whilethe useful life and wearout intervals are not examined, the re-alism of these segments of the curve might also be questioned.Some simple analyses are offered that examine the foundationsfor the traditional bathtub curve for manufactured products; itsindiscriminate use is discouraged here.While most reliability texts mention the bathtub curve, thereis considerable disagreement on its applicability.• Reference [16] describes it as a “typical hazard rate”shape;• [19] claims that “a few products show a decreasing failurerate in the early life and an increasing failure rate in laterlife”;• [11] asserts that the bathtub curve describes “only 10% to15%” of applications;• [18]statesthat“thebathtubcurvecanmodelthereliabilitycharacteristics of a generic piece-part type, but not of anassembly, a circuit, or a system.”;• [8], [12] represent the hzf as the sum (superposition) of a
decreasing hzf, a constant hzf, and an increasing hzf.Interestingly, none of the standard references cited hereprovide compelling
empirical
evidence in support of thebathtub curve for manufactured products. Indeed, there havebeen several efforts to dislodge the bathtub curve from its placeof importance. References [20], [21], and later, [9], advocated
a “roller-coaster” curve for electronic components and provideboth philosophical and analytic justification for such behavior.These papers point to the limitations of the traditional bathtubcurves to adequately-model early life failures.The presence of decreasing hazard near time zero has beenexplained in several ways; two are listed here, although otherexplanations can certainly arise.1) The “physics of failure” explanation [14] postulates thatindividual devices improve with age in their early life. Whilethis explanation might be viable in certain situations (e.g., bio-logical systems, curing of materials), [14] points out that ther-modynamic considerations make it an unconvincing argumentfor manufactured devices.2) References [9], [10] (see also [4], [5], [14]) explain that
a manufactured component belongs to a population at risk of
0018-9529/03$17.00 © 2003 IEEE
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126 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON RELIABILITY, VOL. 52, NO. 1, MARCH 2003
Fig. 1. The hzf over time (the classical bathtub curve).
failure, and this population is comprised of sub-populations ex-hibiting differing hazards. While each of these subpopulationscan exhibitnondecreasinghzfs, thepopulationas awholemightexhibit a decreasing hzf. In a manufacturing context, the sub-populations might represent component parts from various sup-pliers, each of which operates a stable manufacturing process.
2
Section II begins with the assertion that it is physically un-reasonable that any
homogeneous
population of devices shouldexhibit decreasing hazard, and then investigates the relationshipbetween a convex hzf and infant mortalities; a mixture of suchpopulations cannot have a hzf that exhibits the classical bathtubshape in the region near zero.Section III builds a model for lifetime distributions that aremixturesofdistributionswithincreasinghazard,andtheninves-tigates the hzf of this mixture and proves that, under reasonableconditions on the underlying mixture Cdfs, the hzf is always in-creasingintheneighborhoodofzero,andthuscannotexhibittheclassical bathtub shape. Also examined is the practical situationof hzfs for mixtures of Weibull distributions; several examplesillustrate that the hzf can take on several different shapes.Section IV comments on quality control issues related to thehzf.II. W
HAT
D
OES THE
hzf I
MPLY
A
BOUT
E
ARLY
F
AILURES
?The initial decreasing hazard region of the classical bathtubcurve shown in Fig. 1 is often supposed to model “infant mor-talities” due to design or manufacturing defects that cannot becompletely eliminated, resulting in a subpopulation of so-called“weak sisters” [2]. The “weak sister” explanation of infant mor-tality is not analytically consistent with the bathtub curve. Con-sider the case where early failures are characterized by a pop-ulation pdf that has at least 2 modes [10], such as indicated inFig. 2. This section shows that a multimodal pdf cannot have aconvex hzf: the classical bathtub curve is not appropriate in thisscenario.Let be a bimodal pdf of device lifetime and its Cdf.Let be twice differentiable, and . When is bi-modal, there exist (at least) 3 points where changes direction;let , ,besuchthat .Thebasicideais that, ifasubpopulationof earlyfailing devicesexists, thenthecorresponding lifetime pdf should be, at least, bimodal: have atleast 3 stationary points. One of the 2 stationary points nearestzero, is an “infant mortality mode.”
2
This paper does not address “reliability growth”: improvements of a manu-facturing process over time.Fig. 2. The pdf for a population with early failures.
The is(1)thus(2)But, because , then(3)and(4)and therefore, .Nowlet followthebathtubshapeofFig.1: isconvexand positive. It follows that must also be convex and pos-itive, and must be monotone nondecreasing. Becausefollows a bathtub shape, and cannot possibly inter-sect in the decreasing hazard rate region [where is neg-ative] of the bathtub curve. Hence the corresponding canhave no stationary points in the “burn-in region.” Thus the bi-modal pdf as a representation of a mixture of subpopulationsdoes not yield a decreasing hzf during the early life interval,and the bathtub curve does not accommodate this characteriza-tion of early failures.III. S
OME
R
EMARKS
A
BOUT THE
hzf
AND
C
ONVEXITY
This section proves a general result that characterizes mix-tures of distributions whose hzfs increase in a neighborhood of 0. In particular, a sufficient condition is given for the hzf of amixture of such distributions to be increasing in a neighborhoodof 0.Let be a family of sufficiently smooth (contin-uous second time-derivatives) distributions. Define the mixturedistribution by(5)Observe that if is strictly concave at any point , then itshzf is strictly increasing at . To see this, note that(6)
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KLUTKE
et al.
: A CRITICAL LOOK AT THE BATHTUB CURVE 127
Fig. 3. The hzf,
=0
:
1
,
=5
,
=10
,
=5
,
=100
.Fig. 4. The pdf,
=0
:
1
,
=5
,
=10
,
=5
,
=100
.
Then .Moreover, if each is concave in a neighborhood of zero,and if at least 1 of the is strictly concave in this neighbor-hood, then is strictly concave in this neighborhood.To summarize, a sufficient condition for the mixture of dis-tributions with concave Sfs in a neighborhood of 0 to have anincreasing hzf at 0 is that at least 1 of the distributions has a
strictly
concave Sf: such mixtures cannot follow the classicalbathtub shape.The rest of this section illustrates this observation withmixtures of Weibull distributions with increasing hazard rates.Reference [1] considers the hzf of an inverse Gaussian–Weibullmixture and obtains results consistent with this paper. TheWeibull distribution is important in reliability theory, both forempirical reasons (it can be used to model failure-time datawith an increasing or decreasing hzf) and for its relationshipto certain extreme value distributions [17,p. 86]. For Weibulldistributions with increasing hzfs, the Appendix shows that
Fig. 5. The hzf,
=0
:
2
,
=3
,
=15
,
=4
,
=50
.Fig. 6. The pdf,
=0
:
2
,
=3
,
=15
,
=4
,
=50
.
there is a neighborhood around 0 on which the Sf is strictlyconcave. It follows that, although a mixture of such Weibullsmight not be IFR, the corresponding hzf is increasing in theneighborhood of 0, which does not agree with the traditionalbathtub curve.Consider mixtures of the form(7)with . In Figs. 3–10, the caption reports the Weibullshape parameters , and scale parameters , as well asthe mixing parameter .Figs. 3 and 4 show the hzf and pdf for the infant mortalitydistribution in Fig. 2. The hook in the hazard-rate curve corre-sponds to the infant mortality mode in the pdf.Figs. 5 and 6 show the hzf and pdf for a mixture of 2 popu-lations that are somewhat more dispersed than in the previous
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