On-line procedure for terminating an accelerated degradation test

Accelerated degradation testing (ADT) is a useful technique to extrapolate the lifetime of highly reliable products under normal use conditions if there exists a quality characteristic of the product whose degradation over time can be related to reliability. One practical problem arising from designing a degradation experiment is "how long should an accelerated degradation experiment last for collecting enough data to allow one to make inference about the product lifetime under the normal use condition?" In this paper, we propose an intuitively appealing procedure to determine an appropriate termination time for an ADT. Finally, we use some light-emitting diode (LED) data to demonstrate the proposed procedure.