Design of accelerated life test sampling plans with a nonconstant shape parameter

Accelerated life test sampling plans (ALTSPs) provide information quickly on the lifetime distribution of products by testing them at higher-than-usual stress level to induce early failures and reduce the testing efforts. In the traditional design of ALTSPs for Weibull distribution, it is assumed that the shape parameter remains constant over all stress levels. This paper extends the existing design of ALTSPs to Weibull distribution with a nonconstant shape parameter and presents two types of ALTSPs; time-censored and failure-censored. Optimum ALTSPs which satisfy the producer's and consumer's risk requirements and minimize the asymptotic variance of the test statistic for deciding the lot acceptability are obtained. The properties of the proposed ALTSPs and the effects of errors in pre-estimate of the design parameters are also investigated.