A Weibull Reliability Qualification Test Plan Derivation Method based on Similar Product

Reliability Qualification Test (RQT) is widely exercised in engineering, to decide whether product reliability meets specified requirement. RQT is usually mandatorily carried out by referring to the test plans from standards GJB899A(in China) or MIL-STD-781(in U.S.). Most applicable RQTs are Type-I censored, due to the ease of arrangement. The Type-I censored test plans in the standards, often require long test time, and those with short test time attach high producer's and customer's risks. Besides, the usage of the standards assumes that product lifetime follows exponential distribution. For Weibull distributed products, which are also popular in practice, there were few research on deriving RQT plans. To cope with above problems, taking into account the prior information from similar products, which is usually in terms of reliability at certain time, this paper proposes an RQT plan derivation method, to calculate the producer's and customer's risks, and derive the suitable test plans subjected to the risks restraints. A numerical example is presented to illustrate that the test plans derived by the proposed method have much shorter test time and lower risks than that in standard GJB899A. And the robustness of the method is validated in the sensitivity analysis.

Keywords: Reliability Qualification Test, Type-I Censoring, Similar product reliability, Producer's risk, Customer's risk.