Abstract: Accelerated degradation test (ADT) is widely used to evaluate the reliability of highly reliable products with long life if there exists a product quality characteristic whose degradation over time can be related to reliability. Different ADT plans induce very different estimation of reliability and life characteristics with different test cost. It is a main challenge that how to design accelerated degradation test plans which induce precise results with low cost. Aimed at an occasion that analytical solution of optimal plan does not exist, a new method of Monte Carlo simulation-based optimal design for ADT is presented to convert a difficult design problem to a rather simple problem of statistical analysis for application. Optimal design for constant stress accelerated degradation test of light emitting diode is taken as an illustrative example to demonstrate the validity of the proposed method. Results of sensitivity analysis of the optimal test plan show that the plan is robust when the model deviation is small. In application, optimal plans of other types of accelerated degradation test can be obtained by the same method and process as in the example.

Key words: Accelerated degradation test, Mixed-effects model, Monte Carlo simulation, Optimal design, Reliability