Mis-specification analyses and optimum degradation test plan for Wiener and inverse Gaussian processes

Degradation tests are used when there is a quality characteristic related to the life of a product. In this paper, we investigate the model mis-specification effect on the estimation precision of product's mean time to failure (MTTF) and consider a degradation test design problem. The Wiener and inverse Gaussian (IG) processes are two possible models considered. We derive expressions for the mean and variance of the estimated product's MTTF when the true model is an IG process, but is wrongly fitted by a Wiener process. We further discuss the experimental design problem and derive the explicit functional form of the estimation variances. Using the derived functions, optimal degradation test plans assuming a Wiener process model is correctly or wrongly specified are both proposed. The derived plans are applied to a laser data example. We evaluate the test efficiency of the plans derived from a Wiener process assumption when the model is mis-specified. For many optimization criteria, we observe that the obtained plans are robust even when the fitted model is mis-specified. For some criteria that may result in very different test plans under different models, we use a weighted ratio criterion to find practically useful degradation plans under model uncertainty.