Design of Accelerated Life Testing Plans for Products Exposed to Random Usage

Accelerated Life Testing (ALT) is very important in evaluating the reliability of highly reliable products. According to ALT procedure, products undergo higher stress levels than normal conditions to reduce the failure times. ALTs have been studied for various conditions and stresses. In addition to common stresses such as temperature and humidity, random usage can also be considered as another stress that can cause failure. Design of ALT plan for products which are exposed to random usage process has not been studied in the literature. Therefore, a procedure for designing ALT plan for these products is studied in this paper. To do so, hazard rate of products is formulated based on the random usage process and other stresses. Then, the variance of the hazard rate is estimated over a predetermined time period. Optimum stress levels and the number of units at every stress level are obtained by numerically minimizing the variance of the hazard rate estimate. Numerical example and sensitivity analysis are performed to show the application and robustness of the model to parameter deviations. The results show that the proposed procedure is robust to parameter changes and can be used for ALT planning of products under random usage.