A literature review on planning and analysis of accelerated testing for reliability assessment

Abstract

Accelerated testing has been widely used for several decades. Started with accelerated life tests with constant‐stress loadings, more interest has been focused prominently on accelerated degradation tests and time‐varying stress loadings. Because accelerated testing is crucial to the assessment of product reliability and the design of warranty policy, it is important to develop an efficacious test plan that encompasses and addresses important issues, such as design of stress profiles, sample allocation, test duration, measurement frequency, and budget constraint. In recent years, extensive research has been conducted on the optimal design of accelerated testing plans, and the consideration of multiple stresses with interactions has become a big challenge in such experimental designs. The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive review of important methods for statistical inference and optimal design of accelerated testing plans by compiling the existing body of knowledge in the area of accelerated testing. In this work, different types of test planning strategies are categorized, and their drawbacks and the research trends are provided to assist researchers and practitioners in conducting new research in this area.

Modeling and Analysis of Performance Degradation Data for Reliability Assessment: A Review

“…Among all the AT techniques, ALT and ADT are two essential categories that have been widely used in reliability engine-eering [30]. However, since ALT cannot always work well when accelerating the degradation process of longlifetime products, it is necessary to either increase the sample size or prolong the test time.…”

“…Some underlying ideas behind ADT planning are briefly summarized by Meeker and Escobar [29]. Recently, Limon et al [30] comprehensively reviewed the optimal design of ADT and methods for statistical analysis in accelerated degradation modeling. Elsayed [31] provided an overview of ADT planning, resulting in degradation data for a limited test duration, as well as the use of performance degradation data for maintenance strategymaking and reliability assessment.…”

Bayesian Sequential Design Based on Dual Objectives for Accelerated Life Tests

“…Escobar and Meeker [2] provided a review on the accelerated test models. Limon et al [10] provided a review on planning and analysis of the accelerated tests for assessing reliability.…”

Optimal design of a simple step‐stress accelerated life test under progressive type I censoring with nonuniform durations for exponential lifetimes

“…Lately, Han and Ng and Han analyzed the efficiency of the optimal step‐stress ALT to that of the optimal constant‐stress ALT under time and cost constraints with uniform and nonuniform stress durations. For concise reviews and resources on planning, modeling, and analyzing the step‐stress ALT, readers are referred to Nelson, Meeker and Escobar, Bagdonavicius and Nikulin, Collins et al, and Limon et al Furthermore, due to time and resource constraints, censored sampling is usually necessary in practice, and in particular, a generalized censoring scheme known as progressive type I censoring allows functional test units to be withdrawn successively from the experiment at some prefixed nonterminal time points. Those withdrawn unfailed units can be used in other tests in the same or at a different facility; see, for instance, Cohen, Lawless, and Balakrishnan et al Despite its flexibility and efficient utilization of the available resources compared with the conventional sampling methods, progressively censored sampling has not gained much popularity in ALT, partly due to its complicated likelihood function rendering its statistical analysis rather difficult or mathematically intractable; see Balakrishnan, Pradhan and Kundu, Cramer and Iliopoulos, and Bhattacharya et al …”