Abstract
Warranty policy is a useful tool for the manufacturers to compete with others. When a product fails during the warranty period, manufacturers shall provide their consumers with free charge service for the products. Therefore, the return rate prediction during the warranty period is an important decision problem for manufacturers. Recently, several research works focus on using the in-field laboratory testing data to predict the return rate during the warranty period. However, the results are very restricted to a single-product with continuous measurements for laboratory data. For the consumptive information and communication technology (ICT) products, however, “Go/ no go” laboratory data is very common. In addition, laboratory data may only have very few failed data during the test. In this situation, there is no suitable tool for analyzing this kind of data. In this study, taking tablet computer for example, we propose a “Hierarchical Structure” to incorporate all failure information so that the parameters in the laboratory failure model can be estimated efficiently. The advantage of the proposed method is that even for zero-failure data, this method still provides us a robust estimation for the process parameters, and gives us a precise prediction on the return rate.