Abstract
In modern times, accelerated testing of products has become an integral part of manufacturing industry in order to gauge the life span of the products under simulated stresses. Present article focuses on the step-stress partially accelerated life tests (SS-PALT) when the lifetime of a product follows generalized Rayleigh distribution (GRD). Maximum likelihood (ML) estimates and the acceleration factor (AF) are obtained based on type II censoring scheme. Statistical properties of the estimates, with two sets of true parameters, were studied in terms of relative absolute bias (RABias), mean square error (MSE) and relative error (RE). Moreover, variance-covariance (var-cov) matrices of the estimated parameters were produced and confidence intervals for two different levels were also presented in tabulated form. All estimates of the true parameters were obtained using iterative process. Large/small properties hold good for the proposed SS-PALT with GRD.