• Journal of the Korean Statistical Society
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• 제28권4호
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• pp.415-433
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• 1999

This paper considers the design of step-stress accelerated life tests for the Weibull distribution with a nonconstant shape parameter under Type I censoring. It is assumed that scale and shape parameters are log-linear functions of (possibly transformed) stress and that a cumulative exposure model holds for the effect of changing stress. The asymptotic variance of the maximum likelihood estimator of a stated quantile at design stress is used as an optimality criterion. The optimum three step-stress plans are presented for selected values of design parameters and the effects of errors in pre- estimates of the design parameters are investigated.