An Approach to System Reliability Demonstration Based on Accelerated Test Results on Components

Reliability demonstration is often mandatory for industrials that need to prove the quality of their production. In a reliability objective at the global system level, the basic use of standards such as MIL-HDBK-781 or IEC-60300 for reliability demonstration of each subsystem must be adjusted. Practitioners often have to fix high-level reliability goals (around 0.999) on each subsystem to guarantee that system reliability exceeds 0.8. Moreover the confidence obtained for an overall reliability drops down to non-admissible values because of the multiplicity of testing procedures. We propose an approach, from k accelerated tests, to determine an optimized test time whilst ensuring that the reliability of a component system is greater than a goal value and by avoiding the too conservative method consisting in multiplying the confidence levels