Reliability Demonstration Test Design Method Based on Two-Stage Test with Zero Failure Data

Reliability Demonstration Test (RDT) is the test to verify that the reliability of the product meets the reliability requirements during the product development and is usually required to be performed to determine whether it can be accepted. A traditional RDT is based on failure data obtained from tests during product development, to qualify product reliability. Due to advances in technology, many products are becoming highly reliable, which often results in few failures in development tests. So traditional methods are difficult to be applied to such cases where few failure data are available. In this paper, we provide an RDT design method for products following exponential distribution during two stages of development, combining the failure data of the previous stage with the zero-failure data of the second stage as the a priori information of the product lifetime by data folding method. Then Bayesian method is applied to obtain the lifetime distribution of the product to calculate risks of producer and user and to determine the RDT plan for the products restricted to the two risks. A case study is carried out to validate our proposed RDT design method for high reliability products, and to verify the feasibility of the proposed method by comparing it with the classical test method.