Optimal Design of Accelerated Degradation Tests under the Constraint of Total Experimental Cost in the Case that the Degradation Characteristic Follows a Wiener Process

For the highly reliable products, an accelerated degradation test (ADT) is a useful tool which has been employed in industry to obtain reliability-related information within an affordable amount of time and cost. In an ADT, as all other reliability tests, it is important to carefully design the ADT beforehand to obtain estimates of the quantities of interest as precisely as possible. In this paper, optimal ADTs are developed assuming that the constant-stress loading method is employed and the degradation characteristic follows a Wiener process. Under the constraint that the total cost does not exceed a pre-specified budget, the stress levels, the number of test units allocated to each stress level and the number of measurement (termination time) are determined such that the asymptotic variance of the maximum likelihood estimator of the q-th quantile of the lifetime distribution at the use condition is minimized.