An advanced acceptance reliability sampling plan for heterogeneous items subject to external shocks

In practice, many engineering items have more than one failure mode, whereas most of the existing reliability acceptance sampling plans reported in the literature assume that they have only one basic failure mode. To fill the gap, in this paper, we propose a reliability sampling plan for items with an additional failure mode that is due to external shocks. Moreover, heterogeneous populations of items are considered when items' lifetime distributions differ from subpopulation to subpopulation. A new two-stage reliability sampling plan that takes into account these factors has been developed, where the lifetimes of items in a population are stochastically compared before and after the acceptance test. It is shown that the developed sampling plan improves the reliability characteristic of the population.