Order statistics for some common hazard rate functions with an application

Purpose – The problem is to devise a life‐test acceptance procedure of an electrical item that has a Weibull failure distribution with an increasing hazard rate. The test‐bed facility has some constraints on the number of test samples and testing time. Design/methodology/approach – The life‐test plan is obtained using censoring of experiments and the properties of order statistics. In this article, the author has derived expressions for order statistics and their moments for some commonly used hazard‐rate functions; for example, constant, linearly increasing, exponentially increasing, power function, etc. and the same is used in planning the life‐test acceptance procedure. Findings – Results and findings are discussed in full. It is postulated that further research in this direction will definitely bring some fruitful results that have immense importance in the field of reliability analysis and life‐testing experiments. Originality/value – The same methodology can be adopted for devising life‐test acceptance procedure using censoring of experiments.