Estimation of Three-Parameter Weibull Distribution Based on Artificial Fish-Swarm Algorithm

Three-parameter Weibull distribution (TPWD) plays an important role and is widely used in failure distribution modeling in reliability studies, which makes the estimation of its parameters very important and a hot study topic. In this paper, a new method of TPWD parameters estimation is proposed by integrating the artificial fish-swarm algorithm (AFSA) with the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method. In contrast to the existing methods, where the maximum log-likelihood value is obtained by solving the maximum likelihood equations set, the log-likelihood maximization is achieved directly using AFSA in the proposed method. And then the parameters of TPWD can be obtained according to the maximum likelihood value. The case study shows that the new method proposed in this paper is easy to be processed and has a good precision. It provides a new and highly efficient way to estimate the parameters of TPWD, and therefore provides a new way to evaluate the reliability and life distribution of products whose life distributions are considered as typical TPWD.