Optimum ramp-stress accelerated life test for m identical repairable systems

This paper proposes optimum ramp accelerated life test (ALT) of m identical repairable systems using non-homogeneous power law process (PLP) under failure truncated case. An ALT with linearly increasing stress is a ramp test. In particular, a ramp test with two different linearly increasing stresses is a simple ramp test. The optimum ramp test with different stress rates is formulated by determining the proportions of test systems allocated to each stress rate using D-optimality criterion. D-optimality criterion minimizes the reciprocal of the determinant of the Fisher information matrix of the model parameters. The method developed is illustrated using two stress rates and three stress rates. It has been found that it takes much longer to obtain same estimated expected no. of failures at baseline condition than at stress levels.