A Study on the Optimal Sampling for Predicting Failure Rate of One-Shot Weapon Systems

The Army's rocket missile is a one-shot weapon system, which is produced and used for only one mission, and requires high reliability. While reliability analysis with failure data can result in underestimation of the life distribution, reliability analysis with all the non-failure data can result in overestimation of the life distribution. Under or overestimation of the life distribution can lead to cost increase by early disposal or complete observation of all rocket missiles. In order to overcome this problem, the Army suggests the guideline of the number of samples from non-failure data for reliability analysis with failure data. However, the currently used sampling method can generate errors for predicting the failure rate. To solve this problem, this study proposes a new sampling procedure for predicting a future failure rate using non-failure data. The comparison test between the currently used sampling method and the proposed sampling method is conducted and the result shows that the proposed sampling method can predict the future failure rate more accurately