Optimal Burn-In Procedures for a System Performing Given Mission

Burn-in is a widely used method to improve the quality of products or systems after they have been produced. In this paper, the problem of determining optimal burn-in time for a system which performs given mission is considered. It is assumed that the given mission time is not a fixed constant but a random variable which follows an exponential distribution. Assuming that the underlying lifetime distribution of a system has an eventually increasing failure rate function, an upper bound for the optimal burn-in time which maximizes the probability of performing given mission is derived. The obtained result is also applied to an illustrative example.