Customer-centered reliability methodology

This paper proposes a series of reliability measures for multistate reliability models. As quality and reliability should be defined from the viewpoint of the customer, so should reliability measures. The circumstances under which each measure approximates customer satisfaction are discussed, and a new measure based on lifetime weighting functions is introduced in an attempt to make the multistate reliability model more responsive to time-varying customer demands. Examples are given of the calculation of these measures for a typical continuous-time Markov model, and the extension of these measures to continuous and mixed models is discussed.