ACCEPTANCE SAMPLING PLANS FOR BIRNBAUM-SAUNDERS DISTRIBUTION UNDER TRUNCATED LIFE TESTS

Abstract

For modeling fatigue data, satatistical distributions are often used because the lifetimes of a fatiguing material can vary due to manufacturing variation or random flaws in the material. One of the popular distributions to describe the number of stress cycles until failure, or analogously, time to failure is the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution. If the lifetimes of products have the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution and a life test is conducted, one objective of the test is to accept the lot when the test shows that the mean life of products exceeds the standard; otherwise, we reject the lot if the test shows that the mean life of products below the standard. Frequently, it might time consuming to wait until all the products fail in a life test if the lifetimes of products are high. In this paper, a truncated life test is proposed to the Birnbaum-Saunders life data, which can save the testing time. An algorithm is provided to obtain the sampling plans based on the truncated life test. Moreover, some useful tables are provided for the sampling plans under Birnbaum-Saunders distribution.