Dr Yuan LU, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

07-04-2006

14:00 p.m. to 15:00 p.m.

Faculty of Engineering, Seminar Room E1-06-07, NUS

Based on field data of high volume consumer electronics products, we have learned that consumer complaints can be caused not only by mismatch between product performance and technical specifications (technical failures) but also by mismatch between customer requirements and technical specifications (non-technical failures). Classical technical reliability (TR) definition does not take the consumer perceived non-technical failures into consideration. This observation motivates a customer-focused reliability (CR) approach. A model based on Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) is proposed to analyze CR further. By using reliability-related customer profile and reliability-related customer use profile information, this model can be used to quantitatively analyze how often certain CR problems are caused by different types of customers and different ways of customer use for highly innovative consumer electronics products. This approach can be used to analyze root causes related to customer and customer use of field reliability problems. It can also give feedback to the current product development strategy and test coverage and predict future CR. In order to apply the CR approach in practice, the first step is to model the related consumer and consumer-use profiles. Some recent research results are also discussed.

Yuan Lu received her BSc and MSc degree with the Department of Mathematics from Xi`an Jiao Tong University, P. R. China, in 1993 and 1996. She also received her MEng with the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the National University of Singapore in 1999. From 1998 till early 2000, She worked as a Research Engineer at the Center for Robust Design at NUS. In 2002, she obtained her joint PhD in engineering science at both Eindhoven University of Technology and National University of Singapore. Currently she is working as an assistant professor in the sub-department Quality and Reliability Engineering at the Faculty Technology Management of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research interests include reliability analysis and management of highly innovative product-development-processes. She has authored and co-authored over ten papers on these subjects.