Burn-in for Systems Operating in a Shock Environment

Burn-in is a widely used engineering method to eliminate defective items before they are shipped to customers or put into field operation. Burn-in procedures are usually applied to items with high initial failure rate which operate under a static operational environment. In this paper, we consider burn-in for items that operate in an environment with shocks. We assume that there are two competing risk causes of failure: the `usual' degradations, and environmental shocks. A new type of burn-in via controlled (laboratory) test shocks is considered, and the problem of obtaining the optimal level (severity) of these shocks is investigated. Furthermore, we combine the conventional burn-in procedure with burn-in via shocks in one unified model.