Some considerations on system burn-in

The questions of whether or not to perform system burn-in, and how long the burn-in period should be, can be answered by developing a probabilistic model of the system lifetime. Previously, such a model was obtained to relate component burn-in information & assembly quality to the system lifetime, assuming that the assembly defects introduced in various locations of a system are capable of connection failures represented by an exponential distribution. This paper extends the exponential-based results to a general distribution so as to study the dependence of system burn-in on the defect occurrence distribution. In particular, a method of determining an optimal burn-in period that maximizes system reliability is developed based on the system lifetime model, assuming that systems are repaired at burn-in failures.