Abstract

We considered five generalizations of the standard Weibull distribution to describe the lifetime of two important components of sugarcane harvesting machines. The harvesters considered in the analysis harvest an average of 20 tons of sugarcane per hour and their malfunction may lead to major losses; therefore, an effective maintenance approach is of main interest for cost savings. For the considered distributions, mathematical background is presented. Maximum likelihood is used for parameter estimation. Further, different discrimination procedures were used to obtain the best fit for each component. At the end, we propose a maintenance scheduling for the components of the harvesters using predictive analysis.