An information‐based burn‐in procedure for minimally repaired items from mixed population

Burn‐in is a method used to eliminate the initial failures in field use. In this paper, we will consider an information‐based burn‐in procedure for repairable items, which is completely new type of burn‐in procedure. By this procedure, based on the operational (failure and repair) history of the items observed during burn‐in procedure, those with poor reliability performance are eliminated. From a probabilistic point of view, this burn‐in procedure utilizes the information contained in the ‘random paths’ of the corresponding point processes. A general formulation of the model will be suggested, and under the suggested framework, two‐stage optimization procedure for determining optimal burn‐in procedures will be studied in detail. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.