What are events and incidents?

Events/incidents are single events or occurrences that happen, especially one that is particularly significant, that results in a failure from a non-aging mechanism for reliability purposes. Usually the event/incident result in a serious consequence of the loss of functional life of a component or system. The death of the device must be recorded as censored (suspended) data.

Why events and incidents?

For reliability purposes, failure of the component, device, subassembly, or system has been a success up to the point in life where a failure from a non-aging event took place. This means the event-age was a success (up to the point it was killed by an event/incident) and inclusion of the data is required as censored/suspended data-this is important data.

When to use events and incidents?

Include the suspended/censored data into every analysis. Young suspensions/censored data have little impact on the results of an analysis but old suspensions have major effect on the analysis.

Where to use events and incidents?

The data is used for MTBF/MTTF analysis and particularly for Weibull analysis.

These definitions are written by H. Paul Barringer

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