Keynote Presentation by Prof. Pecht: "A New Approach to Qualification"
Products are changing very rapidly. Customers have more choices, tremendous price pressures are affecting suppliers. As a result, there is pressure to test quickly. However, the traditional test and qualification standards are often inadequate. Over the past 10 years, there have been an increasingly large number of products that have passed qualification tests but have failed in the field. The resulting costs of these failures have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars for many companies.
This talk by Prof. Pecht covered some recent significant and costly product problems and the reasons why the qualification tests were inadequate. Given the flaws in current qualification tests, alternatives were presented and discussed in terms of effectiveness, time and costs. One new approach pertains to in-situ product reliability assessment incorporating a fusion of data recognition and physics-of-failure-based prognostics. Prognostics is the process of assessing the extent of deviation or degradation of a product from its expected normal operating conditions over time to predict the future reliability of the product.
