Acceptance reliability sampling plan for discrete lifetime models

Various types of acceptance reliability sampling plans have been reported in the literature. Most of the existing studies deal with the lifetimes of items described by continuous distributions. However, discrete lifetimes are also frequently encountered in practice. For example, field failures are often collected and reported daily, weekly, and so forth. Items often operate in cycles and the experimenter observes the number of cycles successfully completed prior to failure. In this study, we develop a variables acceptance reliability sampling plan for items having discrete lifetimes. Furthermore, the reliability improvement in the population reliability characteristics after the testing procedure, as compared to those before the test, is discussed in detail. The reliability sampling acceptance test is applied for heterogeneous populations using the alternative discrete hazard rate for the corresponding proportional hazards model. Some numerical examples illustrate our findings.