Direct Prediction Methods on Lifetime Distribution of Organic Light-Emitting Diodes From Accelerated Degradation Tests

Accelerated degradation testing (ADT) expedites product degradation by stressing the product beyond its normal use. To extrapolate the product's reliability at use condition, the ADT requires a known functional link relating the harsh testing environment to the usual use environment. Practitioners are often faced with a great challenge to designate an explicit form of the stress-degradation relationship
a priori
in accelerated degradation models. In this paper, we propose three methods to make direct inference on the lifetime distribution itself without invoking arbitrary assumptions on the degradation model: delta approximation, multiple imputation of failure-times, and the lifetime distribution-based (LDB) method. The methods are easy to implement without computational difficulty, hence they have potential in a wide range of applications for estimating lifetime distributions from ADT data. We applied the methods to two ADT data sets including a real application of commercial organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). The analysis of the examples and simulation results suggests parametric LDB and multiple imputation method as more potential alternatives to traditional failure-time approaches, especially for the case where there is neither enough physical background, nor historical evidence supporting presumed relationships between stress and the parameters of the degradation model.