Global planning of accelerated degradation tests based on exponential dispersion degradation models

The accelerated degradation test (ADT) is an efficient tool for assessing the lifetime information of highly reliable products. However, conducting an ADT is very expensive. Therefore, how to conduct a cost‐constrained ADT plan is a great challenging issue for reliability analysts. By taking the experimental cost into consideration, this paper proposes a semi‐analytical procedure to determine the total sample size, testing stress levels, the measurement frequencies, and the number of measurements (within a degradation path) globally under a class of exponential dispersion degradation models. The proposed method is also extended to determine the global planning of a three‐level compromise plan. The advantage of the proposed method not only provides better design insights for conducting an ADT plan, but also provides an efficient algorithm to obtain a cost‐constrained ADT plan, compared with conventional optimal plans by grid search algorithms.