The Use of Consulting Work to Teach Statistics to Engineering Students

This article presents the use of an interesting consulting problem as a practical exercise for a basic course in statistics for engineering students. The consulting problem considered is the estimation of the reliability of the Spanish power generating system. We have used this problem to illustrate the distribution of sums of random variables, the central limit theorem and its limitations, and other issues. We have also designed a practical exercise to show the students the use of Monte Carlo simulation to solve part of the statistical problem.