On the Most Economical Choice of a Life Testing Procedure for Exponentially Distributed Data

Abstract

The choice of constants that define a life test procedure is considered when the number of items that can be tested is limited. Under certain conditions the optimum (minimum cost) procedure is shown to be partial replacement and explicit expressions are given for the optimum values of the constants. Comparisons with the complete replacement and no replacement procedures are made in an example and the incentive (reduction in cost) for removing the restriction is derived.