Statistically Precise and Energy Efficient Accelerated Life Testing

The basic idea of accelerated life testing (ALT) is to expose test units of a product to harsher-than-normal operating conditions to expedite failures so that the failure time distribution of the product and the associated life-stress relationship can be determined in a short time period. However, ALT often consumes significant amounts of energy. To avoid waste of energy in a wide spectrum of product development processes, we explore a new experimental design methodology that improves the reliability estimation precision of an ALT experiment while minimizing the total energy consumption of the experiment. The resulting optimally designed ALT experiment depends not only on the reliability of the product to be tested but also on the characteristics of the test equipment and the capability of its controller. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate the use of the methodology in practice.