A TERMINATION RULE FOR DEGRADATION EXPERIMENTS

Analysis of degradation data can provide information about the lifetim e of highly reliable products, if there exists a product characteristi c whose degradation over time can be related to reliability. To obtain a precise estimator of a product mean time-to-failure, one practical problem arising from designing a degradation experiment is: How long s hould the experiment last? This paper proposes a termination rule to d etermine an appropriate stopping time of a degradation experiment. A c ase study of an LED product illustrates the method, The proposed proce dure is computationally simple and provides reliability analysts for o h-line real-time information of the product lifetime when the terminat ion time is determined.