Designing acceptance sampling schemes for life testing with mixed censoring

Abstract Mixed censoring is useful extension of Type I and Type II censoring and combines some advantages of both types of censoring. This paper proposes a general Bayesian framework for designing a variable acceptance sampling scheme with mixed censoring. A general loss function which includes the sampling cost, the time‐consuming cost, the salvage value, and the decision loss is employed to determine the Bayes risk and the corresponding optimal sampling plan. An explicit expression of the Bayes risk is derived. The new model can easily be adapted to create life testing models for different distributions. Specifically, two commonly used distributions including the exponential distribution and the Weibull distribution are considered with a special decision loss function. We demonstrate that the proposed model is superior to models with Type I or Type II censoring. Numerical examples are reported to illustrate the effectiveness of the method proposed. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004