Evaluating Lifetime Performance for the Pareto Model with Censored Information

The lifetime capability index L
_tp
has been proposed to measure the business lifetime performance, wherein the output lifetime measurements are considered precise from the Pareto model with censored information. In the present study, we study the more realistic situation where the lifetime output data are imprecise. Using the approach taken by Buckley with some extensions, a set of confidence intervals, one on top of the other, is used to produce the triangular shaped fuzzy number for a fuzzy estimate of the lifetime capability index L
_tp
. With the sampling distribution used for the estimation of L
_tp
, two useful fuzzy inference criteria, the critical value and the fuzzy p-value , are proposed to assess the lifetime performance based on L
_tp
. Finally, we give an example of the business lifetime data provided by Hong et al. to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method.