Title:  Some Selection Procedures for the Birnbaum-Saunders Distribution

Presenter:  Dr. Jeanne Hill, Baylor University

In 1969, Z. W. Birnbaum and S. C. Saunders introduced a new fatigue life distribution which bears their names.  This distribution was derived from considerations of the physical behavior of material subjected to cyclically repeated stress patterns.  The distribution models the number of cycles needed to force the length of the fatigue crack to grow past a critical length.  This talk will review some general results about the distribution and introduce new procedures for comparing two or more Birnbaum-Saunders populations.  For two ore more independent Birnbaum-Saunders populations with unknown scale parameters, a better population is defined to be the one having a larger scale parameter.  The problem of selecting t best of such populations is considered.