Estimating the parameters of Weibull distribution using simulated annealing algorithm

Weibull distribution plays an important role in failure distribution modeling in reliability studies. It is a hard work to estimate the parameters of Weibull distribution. This distribution has three parameters, but for simplicity, a parameter is omitted and as a result, the estimation of the others will be easily done. When the three-parameter distribution is of interest, the estimation procedure will be quite boring. Maximum likelihood estimation is a good method, which is usually used to elaborate on the parameter estimation. The likelihood function formed for the parameter estimation of a three-parameter Weibull distribution is very hard to maximize. Many researchers have studied this maximization problem. In this paper, we have briefly discussed this problem and proposed a new approach based on the simulated algorithm to solve that. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.