It is extremely important to improve methodologies for the lifetime assessment of porcelain insulators. While there has been a considerable amount of work regarding the phenomena of lifetime distributions, most of the studies assume that aging distributions follow the Weibull distribution. However, the true underlying distribution is unknown, giving rise to unrealistic inferences, such as parameter estimations. In this article, we review several distributions that are commonly used in reliability and survival analysis, such as the exponential, Weibull, log-normal, and gamma distributions. Some properties, including the characteristics of failure rates of these distributions, are presented. We use a Bayesian approach for model selection and parameter estimation procedures. A well-known measure, called the Bayes factor, is used to find the most plausible model among several contending models. The posterior mean can be used as a parameter estimate for unknown parameters, once a model with the highest posterior probability is selected. Extensive simulation studies are performed to demonstrate our methodologies.
