A degradation-based model for joint optimization of burn-in, quality inspection, and maintenance: a light display device application

This paper presents a degradation-based model to jointly determine the optimal burn-in, inspection, and maintenance decisions, based on degradation analysis and an integrated quality and reliability cost model. Degradation modeling plays an important role in reliability prediction and analysis for many highly reliable components and equipment, when the failures can rarely be observed. Unlike traditional applications, quality and reliability must be considered simultaneously for devices subject to degradation, because quality inspection decisions often impact anticipated reliability and failure-time distributions. This paper presents an integrated model to jointly optimize quality and reliability for devices subject to degradation, with a focus on burn-in, quality inspection, and maintenance policies. Based on the degradation modeling and analysis, the reliability function and the time-to-failure distribution are derived under the condition that the quality inspection is applied following the burn-in period. The optimal burn-in, quality inspection, and preventive maintenance policies are determined by minimizing the expected total cost per usage lifetime. The proposed model is illustrated using the application of light display devices, in which the degradation path follows a negative shifted lognormal distribution with a random failure threshold. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the application of our model to the light display devices.