Patent ID: 7221987

Claim:
A method for analyzing reliability of a manufacturing system, said method comprising: receiving an event chronology having a plurality of chronologically ordered event records, said event chronology being associated with a manufacturing system, said manufacturing system including a plurality of machines operating in sequence, each of the plurality of machines operating in sequence being identified by a machine section value, each of the plurality of chronologically ordered event records having a machine section value associated therewith; identifying an adverse event record in the received event chronology; determining a relationship between the adverse event record associated with one of the plurality of machines and at least one previous event record in the event chronology, said at least one previous event record being associated with the one machine or another machine from the plurality of machines, said other machine operating previous to the one machine in the sequence, said determining including comparing the machine section value of the identified adverse event record and the machine section value of the previous event record; and incrementing a value representative of a correlation between the identified adverse event record and the previous event record as a function of the determined relationship.