Track 3 Session 11

10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Thursday, June 17, 2010

Objective Bayesian Reliability Modeling for a Surface Missile Safety and Arming Device

It has been a challenge to missile communities to utilize all available test data to develop credible reliability models because ground and flight testing consist of different levels of reliability information. In general, the flight data are more informative than the ground test data. Integration of all available test data taken from different sources requires sophisticated reliability modeling. This presentation will demonstrate how to develop an objective Bayesian reliability model for a surface missile safety and arming device by integrating both non-destructive (QE Testing) and destructive (Flight Testing) test data. It will cover the ground rules and assumptions, reliability model form, Bayesian statistical methodology and results. The computational tool used to generate the results was WinBUGS/SAS.

Key Words: Information Integration, Objective Bayesian Reliability Modeling, Markov Chain Monte Carlo Simulation (MCMC), Degradation Based Reliability Model, Flight Based Reliability Model

Sam Tam

NSWC, Corona Division, U.S. Navy

Corona, California