Assessing the Lifetime Performance Index of Exponential Products With Step-Stress Accelerated Life-Testing Data

Abstract

Lifetime performance assessment has been crucial to the manufacturing industry. In practice, a lifetime performance index CL is used to measure the larger-the-better type quality characteristics. Accelerated life test (ALT) has often been used to yield information quickly so that the life distribution of products can be estimated. This study constructs a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of CL for exponential products based on type II right censored data from the step-stress accelerated life test (SSALT). The MLE of CL is then utilized to develop the hypothesis testing procedure with the given lower specification limit L . This new testing procedure can be easily applied to assess whether the lifetime of products meets the requirements. Finally, we give two examples to explicate the proposed testing procedures.