A type-II censored, log test time based, component-testing procedure for a parallel system

The authors consider the problem of acceptance testing for a parallel (1-out-of-n:G) system of different components with constant failure rates. The components are individually tested and the tests are terminated as soon as a preassigned number of each component fails. The authors provide a criterion for accepting or rejecting the system based on the sum of the logarithms of the total times on test for each component. The critical level for the test statistic is chosen so as to guarantee that the specified consumer and producer risks on the system reliability are not exceeded. The use of this statistic makes the computation of these critical values much simpler as compared with that of a previously used statistic based on the product of the total times on test for each component. Several approximate procedures are considered for deriving these critical values. The authors also formulate the optimization problem for deriving the minimum-cost component-testing plans when a type-II censored component-test procedure is used for a parallel system