Degradation-based burn-in with preventive maintenance

As many products are becoming increasingly more reliable, traditional lifetime-based burn-in approaches that try to fail defective units during the test require a long burn-in duration, and thus are not effective. Therefore, we promote the degradation-based burn-in approach that bases the screening decision on the degradation level of a burnt-in unit. Motivated by the infant mortality faced by many Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMSs), this study develops two degradation-based joint burn-in and maintenance models under the age and the block based maintenances, respectively. We assume that the product population comprises a weak and a normal subpopulations. Degradation of the product follows Wiener processes with linear drift, while the weak and the normal subpopulations possess distinct drift parameters. The objective of joint burn-in and maintenance decisions is to minimize the long run average cost per unit time during field use by properly choosing the burn-in settings and the preventive replacement intervals. An example using the MEMS devices demonstrates effectiveness of these two models. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.