On Accelerated Life Testing When the AFT Model Fails

The accelerated failure time (AFT) model is most commonly used model in accelerated life testing (ALT). This model is restrictive as failure time distributions under different constant stresses differ only in terms of scale. If it is not the case, most papers on ALT use a generalization of the AFT model supposing that under different stresses not only scale but also shape parameters are different. This model has an undesirable property for accelerated experiments-the survival functions corresponding to usual and accelerated stresses intersect. In this paper, we propose flexible generalizations of the AFT model. Estimation procedures and properties of estimators are discussed. Goodness-of-fit (GOF) tests for the given models are proposed. Examples of data analysis are provided. Generalization of the results in case of step stresses is presented.