ANALYSIS OF ACCELERATED LIFE TESTS WITH WEIBULL FAILURE DISTRIBUTION VIA GENERALIZED LINEAR-MODELS

Efficient industrial experiments for reliability analysis of manufactured goods may consist in subjecting the units to higher stress levels than those of the usual working conditions. This results in the so called ''accelerated life tests'' where, for each pre-fixed stress level, the experiment ends after the failure of a certain pre-fixed proportion of units or a certain test time is reached. The aim of this paper is to determine estimates of the mean lifetime of the units under usual working conditions from censored failure data obtained under stress conditions. This problem is approached through generalized linear modelling and related inferential techniques, considering a Weibull failure distribution and a log-linear stress-response relationship. The general framework considered has as particular cases, among others, the Inverse Power Law model, the Eyring model, the Arrhenius model and the generalized Eyring model. In order to illustrate the proposed methodology, a numerical exaple is provided.