A modified reliability acceptance sampling plan with warranty return rate consideration under Weibull‐distributed accelerated lifetime data

Abstract

Warranty is a standard and essential policy for today's products. The period and cost of warranty are majorly affected by the reliability of products. Therefore, validation and verification of product reliability are required to control warranty costs and sustain the brand reputation. In this paper, we propose a modified reliability acceptance sampling plan (MRASP) for product reliability validation. The operating characteristic function of the MRASP is derived by considering the accelerated time‐to‐failure data with Type‐II censoring, which follows a Weibull distribution. To minimize the number of failures required for the accelerated life test and consider the sampling risk constraints, we constructed an optimization model to determine the optimal plan design of the proposed MRASP. Following the optimal plan design, practitioners can set the number of failures required in the accelerated life test to estimate the lifetime capability of the submitted lot and decide the lot disposition using the acceptance benchmark. In addition, the lifetime capability estimation can be used to infer the warranty return rate and warranty cost of the lot, which is valuable for practitioners to formulate the warranty budget. Finally, we illustrate a real‐world case to demonstrate the practicality and applicability of the proposed method.