Resumen
Suppose items can be purchased from one of k-suppliers and it is required to purchase from the one with the smaller failure rate or equivalently from the one with the larger mean-time-to-failure. It is assumed that data d, in the form of the times-to-failure for n1,…,nk items from suppliers 1,…,k, respectively is available. There are two suggested selection criteria studied in this paper and when comparing only two suppliers they reduce toP(?1cY2|d),where b and c are prespecified practical constants; ?1 and ?2 are the respective mean failure rates; Y1 and Y2 are the predicted times to failure for individual items purchased from each supplier.