An accelerated life testing model involving performance degradation

Competing risk problems involving degradation failures are becoming increasingly common and important in practice. In this paper, we investigate the modeling of competing risk problems involving both catastrophic and degradation failures under accelerated conditions. By modeling the degradation process as a Brownian motion process for which the first passage time to a boundary is considered as the soft failure, and by modeling hard failures as a Weibull distribution enable us to model accelerated testing in a natural way, make inferences about the parameters of the degradation process and predict the reliability of products at the operating conditions. The methodology is demonstrated and validated using a real case study.