Masked Data Analyses of Reliability Systems Under Accelerated Life Testing

With the enhancement of product reliability, life tests take a long time and consume a lot of costs under normal operating conditions. In order to ensure that the tested products can fail rapidly in a short period of time, accelerated life test (ALT) is considered by several researchers. In masked system lifetime data, the exact failure causes are often unknown. Instead, a subset of components are responsible for the failures. The occurrence of masking is due to a variety of reasons such as lack of proper diagnostic equipment, cost and time constraints associated with failure analysis, recording errors, and the destructive nature of certain failed components that make exact diagnosis impossible. This chapter considers masked data analyses of different reliability systems such as series, parallel, and their various configurations subject to accelerated life testing under the assumption of independent and dependent masking with complete as well as censored data set.