Optimum Simple Step-Stress Accelerated Life Tests with Competing Causes of Failure

Abstract

This paper presents optimum simple step-stress accelerated life tests (ALTs) for products with competing causes of failure. The life distribution of each failure cause, which is independent of the others, is assumed to be exponential with a mean that is a log-linear function of the stress, and a cumulative exposure model is assumed. Optimum plans for time-step and failure-step ALTs are obtained which minimize the sum over all failure causes of asymptotic variances of the maximum likelihood estimators of the log mean lives at design stress. The competing causes of failure affect the optimum test plan only through the product of two ratios - the ratio of the sums of the mean lives and the ratio of the sums of the failure rates over all failure causes at low and high stress levels. The effect of this product (of two ratios) is studied.