Accelerated Burn-In Procedures and System Maintenance Policies

Abstract

Burn-in is a widely used engineering method which is adopted to eliminate defective items before they are shipped to customers or put into field operation. In order to shorten the burn-in process, burn-in is most often accomplished in an accelerated environment. However, there have been few probabilistic or stochastic models for the burn-in procedures in accelerated environment. In this article, under a new stochastic model for accelerated burn-in procedure, the problems of determining both optimal accelerated burn-in time and optimal replacement policy are considered. Components are burned-in under an accelerated environment, then those surviving the burn-in procedure are put into field operation and they are maintained under a replacement policy. The properties of the optimal accelerated burn-in time and optimal replacement policy are obtained and a numerical example which illustrates the usage of obtained results will be presented.

Keywords:

• Accelerated burn-in
• Bathtub-shaped failure rate
• Optimal burn-in
• Replacement policy

Mathematics Subject Classification:

• Primary 60K10
• Secondary 62N05

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOEHRD, Basic Research Promotion Fund) (KRF-2006-331-C00065). The authors thank the referees and the Associate Editor for helpful comments and valuable suggestions, which have improved the presentation of this article considerably.