A comparison of accelerated life testing designs within a single bayesian inferential framework

Accelerated life testing (ALT) is the set of procedures used to reduce the time needed to obtain information related to life characteristics of an item, material or part of interest. Herein we focus on the comparison of different ALT designs (fixed stress, profile ALT, progressive step-stress ALT and regressive ALT) within a single Bayesian inference framework. We shall analyze the pre-posterior variance of the use-stress reliability based on a single failure over the course of the ALT for these different ALT designs. To the best of our knowledge Miller and Nelson in their 1983 paper entitled "Optimum Simple Step-Stress Plans for Accelerated Life Testing" in IEEE Trans. Reliability, Vol. R-32:59-65, were among the firsts to claim similarity of asymptotic estimator variance when comparing step-stress testing ALT to fixed stress ALT. The results in this paper shed some light on this claim within a Bayesian context