Patent ID: 8290802

Claim:
A product deployment and in-service product risk simulation system for predicting the reliability of a plurality of products that will be deployed during a product deployment period, the system comprising: a product removal data source comprising historical product removal data; a product shipment data source comprising historical product shipment data; and a processor coupled to the product removal data source and the product shipment data source, the processor configured to: retrieve historical product removal data from the product removal data source; retrieve historical product shipment data from the product shipment data source; identify a shape parameter and a scale parameter by performing a Weibull analysis on the retrieved historical product removal data and historical product shipment data; and perform a plurality of product deployment simulations: a) predicting a product lifespan for each of the plurality of products, each product lifespan comprising a random failure time that is selected based on values of the shape parameter and the scale parameter; b) determining a total number of operational hours for all deployed products for uniform time intervals of a product deployment period; c) determining a total number of product failures for the uniform time intervals of the product deployment period; d) utilizing a selected base algorithm to determine a product reliability metric for the uniform time intervals of the product deployment period based on the total number of operational hours and the total number of product failures; and e) repeating a) through d) a plurality of times.