Necessity of step-stress accelerated life testing experiment at higher steps

Accelerated life testing (ALT) is a well famous technique in life testing and reliability studies, this is particularly used to induce so high stress leading to failure of the highly reliable units quickly under stipulated duration of time. The step-stress ALT is one of the systematic experimental strategy of ALT applied to fail the units in steps. In this article we focus on two important issues (i) necessity of life tests at higher steps with relevant causes (ii) to develop a new optimum test plan for 3-step SSALT under the modified cumulative exposure model proposed by Khamis and Higgins (1998). It is assumed that the lifetime of test units follows Rayleigh distribution and its scale parameter at constant stress level is assumed to be a log-linear function of the stress. The maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters involved in the step-stress ALT model are obtained. A simulation study is performed for numerical investigation of the proposed new optimum plan 3-step, step-stress ALT. The necessity of the life test units at 3-step step-stress is also numerically examined in comparison to simple step-stress setup.