A novel general approach to evaluating the PCBA for components with different membership function

The logistic support of high tech industry all emphasize that reliability design start, one must fully considers its life cycle. The reliability analysis and prediction are the main work objectives. The purpose is to ensure that the system (product) can achieve its designed functions under specific operating conditions. However, the incomplete failure data and different fault probability density function of the system elementary event also increase the difficulty of reliability design and calculation. It cannot be fully solved by traditional probability reliability. Therefore, a more general and efficient algorithm to assess the system reliability is needed. This paper proposed speculation by experts' opinions according to incomplete information condition. It reasonably gives different fault membership function of possibility of failure distribution under different bottom event. It also applies fault-tree analysis, a-cut of vague set, and interval arithmetic operations of vague set to obtain fault interval and reliability interval of the system. Moreover, this paper also modifies Tanaka et al.'s fuzzy fault-tree definition and extended the new usage to fit different membership function of vague fault-tree. Then, find out the critical elementary event that affects the reliability of the system, which could be used for managerial decision-making, and as the bases to future system maintenance strategy. In numerical verification, a malfunction of printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) is presented as a numerical example. The result of the proposed method is compared with the listing approaches of reliability analysis methods. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.