Abstract
Accelerated life tests are used to explore the lifetime of extremely reliable items by subjecting them to elevated stress levels from stressors to cause early failures, such as temperature, voltage, pressure, and so on. The alpha power inverse Weibull (APIW) distribution is of great significance and practical applications due to its appealing characteristics, such as its flexibilities in the probability density function and the hazard rate function. We analyze the step stress partially accelerated life testing model with samples from the APIW distribution under adaptive type II progressively hybrid censoring. We first obtain the maximum likelihood estimates and two types of approximate confidence intervals of the distributional parameters and then derive Bayes estimates of the unknown parameters under different loss functions. Furthermore, we analyze three probable optimum test techniques for identifying the best censoring under different optimality criteria methods. We conduct simulation studies to assess the finite sample performance of the proposed methodology. Finally, we provide a real data example to further demonstrate the proposed technique.