Cost- and Time-Effective Planning of Accelerated Reliability Demonstration Tests - A New Approach of Comparing the Expenditure of Success Run and End-of-Life Tests

In this paper, existing methods to determine the optimal test strategy are extended by including accelerated life test strategies and models. The approach is based on the determination of lifetime model parameters out of random failure times based on prior knowledge and Monte-Carlo Simulation to estimate the lifetime behavior on nominal testing conditions subsequently. A simulation study is presented to compare the considered test types and strategies, such as Success Run tests, non-accelerated End-of-life tests, and life tests under accelerated conditions. The objective is to minimize test time and costs while maximizing the demonstrated reliability.