Accelerated Life Testing and ALTA

This chapter presents issues relevant to using the ALTA software package to analyze data collected in accelerated life tests. These issues include the types of data that can be analyzed and the types of plots that can be created to display analysis results.

Data and Data Types
The analysis of accelerated life tests relies extensively on data. Specifically, analysis relies on life and stress data or times-to-failure data at a specific stress level. The accuracy of any prediction is directly proportional to the quality and accuracy of the supplied data. Good data along with the appropriate distribution and life-stress model usually result in good predictions. Bad or insufficient data will always result in bad predictions.

In the analysis of life data, we want to use all available data sets, which sometimes are incomplete or include uncertainty as to when a failure occurred. Life data can therefore be separated into two types: complete data (all information is available) or censored data (some of the information is missing). Each type is explained next.

Censored Data
In many cases, all of the units in the sample may not have failed (i.e., the event of interest was not observed) or the exact times-to-failure of all the units are not known. This type of data is commonly called censored data. There are three types of possible censoring schemes, right censored (also called suspended data), interval censored and left censored.

It is generally recommended to avoid interval censored data because they are less informative compared to complete data. This is especially the case in accelerated life tests where the data set affects the accuracy of the fitted life-stress relationship, and subsequently, the extrapolation to Use Stress conditions. However, there are cases when interval data are unavoidable due to the nature of the product, the test and the test equipment. In those cases, caution must be taken to set the inspection intervals to be short enough to observe the spread of the failures. For example, if the inspection interval is too long, all the units in the test may fail within that interval, and thus no failure distribution could be obtained. In accelerated life testing, inspection intervals should be chosen according to the expected acceleration factor at each stress level, and therefore these intervals will be of different lengths for each stress level.

Grouped Data Analysis
Data can also be entered into ALTA individually or in groups. Grouped data analysis is used for tests in which groups of units possess the same time-to-failure or in which groups of units were suspended at the same time. We highly recommend entering redundant data in groups. Grouped data speeds data entry by the user and significantly speeds up the calculations.

A Note about Complete and Suspended Data
Depending on the event that we want to measure, data type classification (i.e., complete or suspended) can be open to interpretation. For example, under certain circumstances, and depending on the question one wishes to answer, a specimen that has failed might be classified as suspended for analysis purposes. To illustrate this, consider the following times-to-failure data for a product that can fail due to modes A, B and C: If the objective of analysis is to determine the probability of failure of the product regardless of the mode responsible for the failure, we would analyze the data with all data entries classified as failures (complete data). However, if the objective of the analysis is to determine the probability of failure of the product due to Mode A only, we would then choose to treat failures due to Modes B or C as suspended (right censored) data. Those data points would be treated as suspended data with respect to Mode A because the product operated until the recorded time without failure due to Mode A.

Plots
In addition to the probability plots required in life data analysis, accelerated life test data analysis utilizes a variety of stress-related plots. Each plot provides information crucial to performing accelerated life test analyses. The addition of stress dependency into the life equations introduces another dimension into the plots. This generates a whole new family of 3-dimensional (3D) plots. The following table summarizes the types of plots available in ReliaSoft's ALTA and ALTA PRO. Considerations relevant to the use of some of the plots available in ALTA are discussed in the sections that follow.

Residual Plots
Residual analysis for reliability consists of analyzing the results of a regression analysis by assigning residual values to each data point in the data set. Plotting these residuals provides a very good tool in assessing model assumptions and revealing inadequacies in the model, as well as revealing extreme observations. Three types of residual plots are available in ALTA.

Standardized Residuals (SR)
The standardized residuals plot for the Weibull and lognormal distributions can be obtained in ALTA. Each plot type is discussed next.

SR for the Weibull Distribution
Once the parameters have been estimated, the standardized residuals for the Weibull distribution can be calculated by:


 * $${{\widehat{e}}_{i}}=\widehat{\beta }\left[ \ln ({{T}_{i}})-\ln (\widehat{\eta }(V)) \right]$$

Then, under the assumed model, these residuals should look like a sample from an extreme value distribution with a mean of 0. For the Weibull distribution the standardized residuals are plotted on a smallest extreme value probability paper. If the Weibull distribution adequately describes the data, then the standardized residuals should appear to follow a straight line on such a probability plot. Note that when an observation is censored (suspended), the corresponding residual is also censored.

SR for the Lognormal Distribution
Once the parameters have been estimated using rank regression, the fitted or calculated responses can be calculated by:


 * $${{\widehat{e}}_{i}}=\frac{\ln ({{T}_{i}})-{{\widehat{\mu }}^{\prime }}}$$

Then, under the assumed model, the standardized residuals should be normally distributed with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 ( $$\tilde{\ }N(0,1)$$ ). Consequently, the standardized residuals for the lognormal distribution are commonly displayed on a normal probability plot.



Cox-Snell Residuals
The Cox-Snell residuals are given by:


 * $${{\widehat{e}}_{i}}=-\ln [R({{T}_{i}})]$$

where $$R({{T}_{i}})$$  is the calculated reliability value at failure time  $${{T}_{i}}.$$  The Cox-Snell residuals are plotted on an exponential probability paper.





Standardized vs. Fitted Values
A Standardized vs. Fitted Value plot helps to detect behavior not modeled in the underlying relationship. However, when heavy censoring is present, the plot is more difficult to interpret. In a Standardized vs. Fitted Value plot, the standardized residuals are plotted versus the scale parameter of the underlying life distribution (which is a function of stress) on log-linear paper (linear on the Y-axis). Therefore, the standardized residuals are plotted versus $$\eta (V)$$ for the Weibull distribution, versus  $${\mu }'(V)$$ for the lognormal distribution and versus $$m(V)$$ for the exponential distribution.