Abstract
Burn-in is a widely used engineering method of elimination of defective items before they are shipped to customers or put into field operation. Under the assumption that a population is described by the decreasing or bathtub-shaped failure rate functions, various optimal burn-in problems have been intensively studied in the literature. In this paper, we consider a new model and assume that a population is composed of stochastically ordered subpopulations described by their own performance quality measures. It turns out that this setting can justify burn-in even in situations when it is not justified in the framework of conventional approaches. For instance, it is shown that it can be reasonable to perform burn-in even when the failure rate function that describes the heterogeneous population of items increases and this is one of the main and important findings of our study.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 273-280 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | European Journal of Operational Research |
| Volume | 210 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 16 Apr 2011 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The work of the first author was supported by Priority Research Centers Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology ( 2009-0093827 ). The work of the second author was supported by the NRF (National Research Foundation of South Africa) grant FA2006040700002 .
Keywords
- Burn-in
- Heterogeneous population
- Performance quality measures
- Reliability
- Stochastically ordered subpopulations