A Bayes-competing risk model for the use of expert judgement in reliability estimation

In an analysis of the reliability of heat exchangers a number of causes of failure and a number of potential failure patterns were identified. To allow a simplification of the analysis five independent groups of failure causes were defined and formed the basis of a competing risks model. Further, lack of data and poor quality data required the experience of experts to be used in a quantitative way through Bayesian methods. Lastly to simplify the elicitation of the prior densities a shape, scale and location parameter model for the failure time distributions was adopted