Reliability acceptance sampling plans for exponentially distributed items under failure censoring

In a reliability acceptance sampling (RAS) plan, the quality characteristic concerned and inspected is the reliability and especially the lifetime of the items. Thus, an RAS plan consists of some life tests. Life tests, also known as reliability tests, are usually time consuming and expensive. Thus, different approaches are introduced in the literature to reduce the time and cost of the tests. One of this methods is failure censoring or type-II censoring: n items are randomly selected from the lot and put them on the test simultaneously. The experiment continues until the s (1≤ s ≤n?) smallest lifetimes of items are observed. On the other hand, lifetime performance index (LPI) measures the capability of a process having a non-negative random variable. In this paper, a repetitive group sampling (RGS) plan is proposed for failure censoring reliability tests while the information obtained during life test is presented using LPI. It is assumed that the lifetime of items follow exponential distribution. The performance of the plan is compared with a single sampling plan, and a real example is presented