Planning of progressive group-censoring life tests with cost considerations

This paper considers a life test under progressive type I group censoring with a Weibull failure time distribution. The maximum likelihood method is used to derive the estimators of the parameters of the failure time distribution. In practice, several variables, such as the number of test units, the number of inspections, and the length of inspection interval are related to the precision of estimation and the cost of experiment. An inappropriate setting of these decision variables not only wastes the resources of the experiment but also reduces the precision of estimation. One problem arising from designing a life test is the restricted budget of experiment. Therefore, under the constraint that the total cost of experiment does not exceed a pre-determined budget, this paper provides an algorithm to solve the optimal decision variables by considering three different criteria. An example is discussed to illustrate the proposed method. The sensitivity analysis is also studied.