Diminishment of Cuts in Durability Test Time Reduction Methods

In this study, we extend and improve on the methods introduced by Brudnak et al. [1] by adding a second objective to the reduction of test time. This second objective under consideration is to diminish or reduce the number of cuts or deletions to the time histories during an editing process. As discussed in [1], segment-based methods consider each segment for retention or deletion based on its own localized severity, not considering the segments around it. As a result, retained segments can be widely scattered in the time domain depending on signal characteristics and therefore a large number of cuts can be induced unintentionally. Regardless of the joining method, such cuts and joins require artificial signal processing and should therefore be minimized. In this paper we present techniques to minimize these cuts while at the same time maintaining our original goals of time reduction and severity retention. The methods presented here use the same segment ordering methods presented in [1], but they additionally add heuristics which prefer minimum retained region sizes and minimum deletion region sizes in order to minimize the number of retained regions. We then present a case study comparing the simulation results to those in [1].