ABSTRACT

Today, there is an increasing demand for improved quality and reliability because of increasingly complex systems putting severe reliability requirements on system components and parts. Reliability improvement is needed. Accelerated life testing as treated in the reliability literature has mostly been used to measure reliability, not to improve it. A change has to be made.

In this chapter we discuss accelerated testing from a reliability improvement point of view. Statistically designed experiments are important in order to find factors affecting reliability. Simple factorial designs, often fractional, as well as more advanced plans, can be used. Robust design methodology is a concept which has to be incorporated into the reliability field. Some simple illustration will be given.