TY - INPR A1 - Kimmerle, Sven-Joachim A1 - Dvorsky, Karl A1 - Liess, Hans-Dieter A1 - Avenhaus, Rudolf T1 - Time to Failure under Varying Thermal Stresses N2 - Varying thermal stresses influence significantly the time to failure of electric components as used, for instance, in automotive devices. For applications as autonomous driving a high reliability has to be guaranteed. In this article we discuss how to combine probability distributions for failure. Discrete and continuous changes of the probability distribution in time are both considered. It turns out that the temporal order of the distributions, corresponding to the succession of stresses in applications, is essential. The latter observation restricts the general applicability of the widely used temperature collectives where only the total time of a temperature stress is considered neglecting the order of the stresses. An application of our results are thermal overstress tests on electric components. We may explain yet not well understood measurements for automotive electric cables. KW - Reliability KW - Applied Probability KW - Data Science KW - Physics of Failure KW - Arrhenius Model Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:861-opus4-19126 ER -