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Step-Stress Testing In Agricultijre, Imad H. Khamis, James J. Higgins

Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture

Step-stress testing has been used for a munber years in engineering. An item is placed on test for a specified period of time. If it does not fail in that time, the stress is increased. This process is repeated for a specified number of stress levels until the item fails. In agriculture, animals or plants may be the test items and dosage of a chemical, amount of fertilizer, temperature, etc, the stress variable. In this paper we suggest several potential applications of step-stress testing in agriculture and present inferential procedures for observations that are distributed exponentially.