UPPER BOUNDS OF OPTIMAL BURN-IN TIME UNDER VARIOUS CRITERIA FOR GENERAL REPAIRABLE PRODUCTS WITH EVENTUALLY INCREASING FAILURE RATE

The bum-in process is a manufacturing technique for ensuring the quality of products after they have been produced. The optimum time for stopping the bum-in process for a given criterion is called the optimal bum-in time. In the literature, assuming the failure rate function of products has a bathtub shape, properties of the optimal bum-in time have been investigated. In this paper, several characteristics of the optimal bum-in problems are studied for the case of eventually increasing failure rate (IFR). Moreover, the failure/repair characterization of products considered in this study are also generalized. Under these assumptions, upper bounds for the optimal bum-in time are derived and discussed. In brief, this paper presents some results that follow from those of Mi (2003) by extending the failure rate function to an eventually IFR and by considering generalized product failure/repair characteristics.

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