Section: Application Domains

Reliability

Collected product lifetime data is often non-homogeneous, affected by production variability and differing real-world usage. Usually, this variability is not controlled or observed in any way, but needs to be taken into account for reliability analysis. Latent structure models are flexible models commonly used to model unobservable causes of variability.

Celeste currently collaborates with PSA Group. To dimension its vehicles, the PSA Group uses a reliability design method called Strength-Stress, which takes into consideration both the statistical distribution of part strength and the statistical distribution of customer load (called Stress). In order to minimize the risk of in-service failure, the probability that a severe customer will encounter a weak part must be quantified. Severity quantification is not simple since vehicle use and driver behaviour can be severe for some types of materials and not for others. The aim of the study is then to define a new and richer notion of the severity from the PSA databases resulting either from tests or client usages. This will lead to a more robust and accurate parts dimensioning method.