OPTIMAL BURN-IN PROCEDURES IN A GENERALIZED ENVIRONMENT

Burn-in procedure is a manufacturing technique that is intended to eliminate early failures. In the literature, assuming that the failure rate function of the products has a bathtub shape the properties on optimal burn-in have been investigated. In this paper burn-in problem is studied under a more general assumption on the shape of the failure rate function of the products which includes the traditional bathtub shaped failure rate function as a special case. An upper bound for the optimal burn-in time is presented under the assumption of eventually increasing failure rate function. Furthermore, it is also shown that a nontrivial lower bound for the optimal burn-in time can be derived if the underlying lifetime distribution has a large initial failure rate.