Abstract
Burn-in is a method used to eliminate initial failures in field use. To burn-in a component or system means to subject it to a period of use prior to the time when it is to actually be used. Under the assumption of decreasing or bathtub-shaped population failure rate functions, various problems of determining optimal burn-in have been intensively studied in the literature. In this paper, we assume that a population is composed of stochastically ordered subpopulations, described by their own performance quality measures and study optimal burn-in, which optimizes overall performance measures. It turns out that this setting can justify burn-in even when it is not necessary in the framework of conventional approaches. For instance, it could be reasonable to perform burn-in even when the failure rate function that describes a heterogeneous population of items increases and this is one of the main and important findings of the current study.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 417-425 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part O: Journal of Risk and Reliability |
| Volume | 226 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2012 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The work of the first author was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MEST) (No. 2011-0017338) and Priority Research Centers Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (grant 2009-0093827). The work of the second author was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa under grant FA2006040700002.
Keywords
- Reliability
- burn-in
- heterogeneous population
- performance quality measures
- stochastically ordered subpopulations