Optimal burn-in based on process history

Burn-in is a method of "elimination" of initial failures (infant mortality), that consists in subjecting the items to a fixed time period of simulated use prior to actual operation. The items which fail during the burn-in procedure are scrapped and are not considered to be of satisfactory quality. The only information used in the conventional burn-in procedure for the elimination of weak items is then the lifetime of the item. In this work, we consider a new burn-in procedure to be used for items subject to degradation phenomena. This burn-in procedure utilizes the information contained in the random paths of a continuous stochastic degradation process (the "process history") in order to eliminate the weak items. The problem of determining the optimal burn-in parameters is considered and the properties of the optimal parameters are derived. A numerical example is also provided.