OPTIMAL BURN-IN TIME AND EVENTUALLY IFR

ABSTRACT Burn-in is a widely used technique for improving the quality of products after they have been produced. The quality of product can be measured by certain reliability characteristics such as survival probability, mean residual life, etc. In some situations, optimal burn-in need to be determined to maximize these reliability characteristics. However, burn-in is costly, and thus cost structure should be considered. Therefore, optimal burn-in time should also be determined to minimize certain cost functions. In the literature, assuming the failure rate function of the products has a bathtub shape it has been shown that the optimal burn-in time should not exceed the first change point of the failure rate function. Instead of bathtub shaped failure rate function, this paper considers the more general eventually IFR and has found that the optimal burn-in time for the objective functions studied in the literature should not exceed the first wear-out point of the eventually IFR.

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