A Subsystem Data Based Reliability Acceptance Test Plan Derivation Method

Reliability acceptance tests are used to qualify product’s reliability, which decides whether the product could be accepted. For highly reliable systems, conventional reliability acceptance tests in standards are not preferred, as the test plans either require long test durations or induce high risks for both producer and consumer, which results from the facts that the methods only use the system test data. Meanwhile, some related reliability data, such as data from subsystem test, are often neglected. To make use of the subsystem data, this paper proposes a reliability acceptance test plan derivation method, to derive system test plans with short test durations while keeping producer and consumer risks low, compared with the conventional RAT plans. A case study is provided to illustrate that when using subsystem test data in deriving system test plans, our proposed method has the potential to reduce the risks and shorten the test duration as well.