A test reduction strategy for reliability demonstration

Abstract

Reliability demonstration always includes experimental approaches, which are expensive in terms of costs and duration.Failure Modes and their effects analysis allows a prioritization of the tests to perform by assessing the criticality of the failure modes.Accelerated testing methods combined with design of experiment and progressive results analysis can highlight the weaknesses of the product.By that way, experimental strategy can be defined to converge to the reliability objectives with the most efficient number of tests.Integrating experience feedback in the test protocol might also improve the test strategy, and Bayesian methodology can also be used to specify the tests needed to demonstrate the reliability target.This paper aims to present a methodology of test reduction, which has been applied on real industrial cases in whole or in part. However, since results cannot be disclosed, no real application will be presented in the paper.