A New Method for Deriving Reliability Qualification Test Plans

A reliability qualification test (RQT) is used to judge whether a batch of products meets pre-specified reliability requirements. For high reliable systems, traditional RQT plans often require long test time or pose high risks to both producer and consumer. To cope with this problem, this paper proposes a new method to derive RQT plans by making use of subsystem data, when both system and subsystems are following exponential distributions. Compared with conventional RQT plans that construct system test based on which decisions are made, the proposed method enables deriving system test plans with much shorter test time and keeping producer and consumer risks under control at the same time. A case study is presented to prove the validity of the proposed method.