Assessing the Lifetime Performance Index of Exponential Products With Step-Stress Accelerated Life-Testing Data

Lifetime performance assessment has been crucial to the manufacturing industry. In practice, a lifetime performance indexCLis used to measure the larger-the-better type quality characteristics. Accelerated life test (ALT) has often been used to yield information quickly so that the life distribution of products can be estimated. This study constructs a maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) ofCLfor exponential products based on type II right censored data from the step-stress accelerated life test (SSALT). The MLE ofCLis then utilized to develop the hypothesis testing procedure with the given lower specification limitL. This new testing procedure can be easily applied to assess whether the lifetime of products meets the requirements. Finally, we give two examples to explicate the proposed testing procedures.