Abstract
Accelerated life testing (ALT) is the process of testing products by subjecting them to strict conditions in order to observe more failure data in a short time period. In this study, we compare the methods of two-level constant-stress ALT (CSALT) and simple step-stress ALT (SSALT) based on competing risks of two or more failure modes with independent exponential lifetime distributions. Optimal sample size allocation during CSALT and the optimal stress change-time in SSALT are considered based on V- and D-optimality, respectively. Under Type-I censoring, numerical results show that the optimal SSALT outperforms the optimal CSALT in a wide variety of settings. We theoretically also show that the optimal SSALT is better than the optimal CSALT under a set of conditions. A real data example is analyzed to demonstrate the performance of the optimal plans for both ALTs.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 902-919 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Quality and Reliability Engineering International |
Volume | 37 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Apr 2021 |
Keywords
- competing risks
- constant-stress ALT
- optimal design
- step-stress ALT
- Type-I censoring