Abstract

Accelerated life tests (ALTs) are widely used in industry and many optimal ALT test plans are developed in literature. To achieve an efficient optimal test plan, one needs to make sure that the planning values used in the test planning are not far away from the true parameters, which is challenging because lifetime data are not collected yet in the planning stage to estimate the true parameters. To overcome the weakness, sequential designs are developed and the parameter estimates are updated during the sequential testing process. Due to the sequential nature, one drawback of the sequential strategy is that it usually requires a long total testing time (TTT). Motivated by industrial needs, we propose batch sequential design (BSD) in ALT setting, in which multiple units are tested simultaneously while sequential parameter updates are also made. The proposed BSD for ALT can not only reduce the TTT but also preserves the advantage of sequential designs. After proposing two types of BSD strategies, we use a comprehensive simulation study to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed BSD in ALT setting. We also develop a method to find the optimal batch size which is essential for the deployment of the BSD in practice.

摘要

加速寿命测试 (ALT) 在工业中得到广泛应用，许多最佳 ALT 测试计划已在文献中开发。为了实现有效的优化测试计划，需要确保测试计划中使用的计划值与真实参数相差不远，这是具有挑战性的，因为在计划阶段还没有收集寿命数据来估计真实参数. 为了克服这个弱点，开发了顺序设计并在顺序测试过程中更新参数估计。由于顺序性质，顺序策略的一个缺点是它通常需要很长的总测试时间 (TTT)。受工业需求的驱动，我们在 ALT 设置中提出批量顺序设计 (BSD)，其中多个单元同时测试，同时也进行顺序参数更新。为 ALT 提出的 BSD 不仅可以减少 TTT，而且还保留了顺序设计的优势。在提出两种类型的 BSD 策略后，我们使用综合模拟研究来证明所提出的 BSD 在 ALT 设置中的优势。我们还开发了一种找到最佳批量大小的方法，这对于在实践中部署 BSD 至关重要。