Article ID: | iaor19991732 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 45 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 629 |
End Page Number: | 644 |
Publication Date: | Sep 1998 |
Journal: | Naval Research Logistics |
Authors: | Ebrahimi Nader, Devarajan Karthik |
Accelerated life testing is concerned with subjecting items to a series of stresses at several levels higher than those experienced under normal conditions so as to obtain the lifetime distribution of items under normal levels. A parametric approach to this problem requires to assumptions. First, the lifetime of an item is assumed to have the same distribution under all stress levels, that is, a change of stress level does not change the shape of the life distribution but changes only its scale. Second, a functional relationship is assumed between the parameters of the life distribution and the accelerating stresses. A nonparametric approach, on the other hand, assumes a functional relationship between the life distribution fuinctions at the accelerated and nonaccelerated stress levels without making any assumptions on the forms of the distribution functions. In this paper, we treat the problem nonparametrically. In particular, we extend the methods of Shaked