Design and Analysis of Accelerated Tests for Mission Critical Reliability

Early approaches to accelerated testing were based on the assumption that there was a simple acceleration factor that would correspond to a linear scaling of time from the operating stress to the accelerating stress. This corresponds to the simplest physical model of the kinetics governing the underlying degradation, but this simple model does not always hold. We need to understand what more complex physical models may look like. Design & Analysis of Accelerated Tests for Mission Critical Reliability presents innovative theory and methods for recognizing and handling the more complicated, cases often encountered in practice. The theory integrates a physical understanding of underlying phenomena and the statistical modeling of observation "noise" to provide a single theoretical framework for accelerated testing. The treatment includes general approaches that can be used with various computational software packages and an explicit computing environment in S-PLUS. Source code written by the authors is included and available for download from http://www.crcpress.com/e_products/downloads. For practitioners, this book provides immediately useable tools. For researchers, it presents intriguing open questions. And for the academic community, numerous worked examples, end-of-chapter exercises, and a format that relegates technical and theoretical details to chapter appendices make this an outstanding supplementary textbook for senior and graduate-level students.