PurposePlanning an accelerated life test (ALT) for a product is an important task for reliability practitioners. Traditional methods to create an optimal design of an ALT are often computationally burdensome and numerically difficult. In this paper, the authors introduce a practical method to find an optimal design of experiments for ALTs by using simulation and empirical model building.Design/methodology/approachInstead of developing the Fisher information matrix-based objective function and analytic optimization, the authors suggest “experiments for experiments” approach to create optimal planning. The authors generate simulated data to evaluate the quantity of interest, e.g. 10th percentile of failure time and apply the response surface methodology (RSM) to find an optimal solution with respect to the design parameters, e.g. test conditions and test unit allocations. The authors illustrate their approach applied to the thermal ALT with right censoring and lognormal failure time distribution.FindingsThe design found by the proposed approach shows substantially improved statistical performance in terms of the standard error of estimates of 10th percentile of failure time. In addition, the approach provides useful insights about the sensitivity of each decision variable to the objective function.Research limitations/implicationsMore comprehensive experiments might be needed to test its scalability of the method.Practical implicationsThis method is practically useful to find a reasonably efficient optimal ALT design. It can be applied to any quantities of interest and objective functions as long as those quantities can be computed from a set of simulated datasets.Originality/valueThis is a novel approach to create an optimal ALT design by using RSM and simulated data.