Evaluation of aileron actuator reliability with censored data

For the purpose of enhancing reliability of aileron of Airbus new-generation A350 XWB,an evaluation of aileron reliability on the basis of maintenance data is presented in this paper.Practical maintenance data contains large number of censoring samples, information uncertainty of which makes it hard to evaluate reliability of aileron actuator.Considering that true lifetime of censoring sample has identical distribution with complete sample, if censoring sample is transformed into complete sample, conversion frequency of censoring sample can be estimated according to frequency of complete sample.On the one hand, standard life table estimation and product limit method are improved on the basis of such conversion frequency, enabling accurate estimation of various censoring samples.On the other hand, by taking such frequency as one of the weight factors and integrating variance of order statistics under standard distribution, weighted least square estimation is formed for accurately estimating various censoring samples.Large amounts of experiments and simulations show that reliabilities of improved life table and improved product limit method are closer to the true value and more conservative; moreover, weighted least square estimate（WLSE）, with conversion frequency of censoring sample and variances of order statistics as the weights, can still estimate accurately with high proportion of censored data in samples.Algorithm in this paper has good effect and can accurately estimate the reliability of aileron actuator even with small sample and high censoring rate.This research has certain significance in theory and engineering practice.