An adaptive lot-traceability sampling plan for Weibull distributed lifetime with warranty return rate consideration and a smart information system

In today's highly competitive market, product warranty is a critical tool that companies use to showcase their product quality and reliability. Companies need to verify and validate product lifetimes to control warranty costs and maintain brand reputation. The reliability acceptance sampling plan is a practical tool for practitioners to validate product lifetimes and determine lot disposition. However, the traditional plan's efficiency decreases as more historical reliability information is included in the decision rule. This paper introduces an adaptive lot-traceability sampling plan (ALSP) that overcomes this limitation by employing a more flexible lot-traceability mechanism. The proposed ALSP can sustainably increase efficiency by accommodating more historical reliability information, resulting in significantly reduced product failures required for life testing. Furthermore, it has superior discriminating power regarding the degradation of lot reliability compared to the existing plan. We also provide an interactive user interface in the form of a smart information system to guide practitioners in designing optimal plans easily. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of the proposed ALSP in an industrial case study.