Reliability

COMPONENTS:

Concepts of Reliability

Factors affecting Reliability

Pattern of Failure

Mean Time to Failure

Fundamental of Statistical Concepts

Concept of Reliability:

Reliability is one of the important characteristics of any test

It refers to the precision or accuracy of the measurement of

score

Reliability refers to the stability of a test measure or protocol.

Definition
Reliability is a major concern when a psychological test is used to measure
some attribute or behaviour.

Reliability refers to the consistency of scores obtained by the same

individuals when re-examined with test on different occasions, or with
different sets of equivalent items, or under other variable examining
conditions.
Basic Reliability Terms

FAILURE
FAILURE RATE
MTBF
MTTF
HAZARD
 Types of Reliability

 Three important types

1. Test –Retest Reliability

2. Split-half or internal Consistency Reliability

3. Parallel forms reliability or Equivalent - forms

 Test –Retest Reliability

 In test- Retest reliability the single form of the test is administrated

twice on the same sample with a reasonable time gap.
 In this way two administration of the same form of the two
independent sets of scores.
 The two sets, when correlated, give the value of the reliability
coefficient.
Test –Retest Reliability
 Split-half Reliability
 Other name Internal Consistency Reliability

 It indicates the homogeneity of the test

 In This method the test is divided into two equal or nearly halves

Common way of this test is the odd-even method

 Parallel-Forms Reliability

 The alternative forms technique to estimate reliability is similar to

the test retest method, except that different measures of a behaviour
(rather than the same measures) are collected at different times
 If the correlation between the alternative forms is low, it could
indicate that considerable measurement error is present, because two
different scales were used
Parallel-Forms Reliability
 Failure

Reliability Engineering distinguishes three characteristics types of

failures (excluding damage caused by careless handling, storing, or

improper operation by the users) which may be inherent in the

equipment and occur without any fault on the part of the operator.
 Types of Failure

 Early failures

 Wearout failures

 Chance failures
 Early failures

These are the failures which occur early in the life of a component.

Some examples are :-

•Poor welds or seals

•Poor solder joints

•contamination on surfaces or in materials

 Wearout failures

There are failures which are caused by wearout of parts. These

occur in an equipments only if it is not properly maintained or not
maintained at all. Phenomena responsible for failure :-

• Corrosion or oxidation

• Insulation breakdown or leakage

• Frictional wear or fatigue

 Chance failures

These failures are caused by sudden accumulations beyond the design

strength of the component. These occur at random intervals, irregularly

and unexpectedly.
Bath Tub Curve
 Mean Time To Failure

Mean time to failure (MTTF) is a maintenance metric that measures the

average amount of time a non-repairable asset operates before it fails. Because

MTTF is relevant only for assets and equipment that cannot or should not be

repaired, MTTF can also be thought of as the average lifespan of an asset.

 MTTF - Mean-Time To Failure

Let F(t) = 1 – R(t), the failure probability and f(t) = dF(t)/dt, the failure probability
density.

Expected working life of a unit with an exponentially distributed reliability is the

inverse of its failure rate.
Fundamentals of Statistical Concepts

 Population and sample

 Parameter and statistic

 Probability
 Population and sample

A population is the set of all items that possess a certain characteristic of

interest.

A sample is a subset of a population. Realistically, in many manufacturing or

service industries, it is not feasible to obtain data on every element in the
population. Measurement and storage of large volumes of data are impractical
and the costs of obtaining such information are high. Thus, we usually obtain
data from only a portion of the population i.e. sample
 Parameter and statistics

A parameter is a characteristic of a population, something that describes it.

A statistic is a characteristic of a sample. It is used to make inferences on the

population parameters that are typically unknown.
 Probability

The probability of an event describes the chance of occurrence of that event.

A probability function is bounded between 0 and 1, with 0 representing the
definite non-occurrence of the event and 1 representing the certain occurrence
of the event.

The set of all outcomes of an experiment is known as the sample space S.

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