Two Reliability Acceptance Sampling Plans for Items Subject to Wiener Process of Degradation

Traditionally, in reliability acceptance sampling plans, the decision to accept or reject a lot is made by performing the life tests of items. However, when the item’s deterioration is described by a degradation process, it can be made based on the observed deterioration levels of the items obtained from degradation tests. In this paper, two acceptance sampling plans are developed, based on the observation of the deterioration of the items, accumulated on a given period of time. To model the degradation of the items over time, the Wiener process with positive drift is employed. Algorithms to find the parameters of the proposed sampling plans are suggested. Conditionally on the acceptance in the test, the developed sampling plans are shown to improve the reliability performance of the items in the sense that the lifetimes of the items after the reliability sampling test are stochastically larger than those before the test. Also, we compare the two sampling plans both from a technical and economical points of view.