Greg Larsen

Many of the "standard" reliability methods are intended for non-repairable systems. That is, when a component, sub-assembly or system fails, it is not repaired and returned to service. The Weibull distribution and other well-known distributions which effectively describe the time to failure assume the failures are "terminal". That is, the whole system is replaced. In contrast, repairable systems may fail multiple times during their lifetimes and this results in "recurrent events" in which system components may be repaired or replaced to bring the system back on line. In this case, a single system actually has multiple ages, i.e. components which have been repaired or replaced are "younger" than the rest of the system. Reliability data comprised of recurrent events should be …

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