An unpunctual preventive maintenance policy for repairable items sold with a two-dimensional warranty
X. Wang, L. Li and M. Xie
https://doi.org/10.19124/ima.2018.001.28
Abstract
The optimization of preventive maintenance (PM) strategies for repairable items sold with warranty contracts has received much attention in the literature. However, the existing research implicitly assumes that maintenance actions within the warranty period are punctual. In practice, it is not uncommon that the actual maintenance instants deviate from the scheduled instants. In this paper, an unpunctual imperfect PM strategy, which allows customers to advance or postpone the scheduled PM actions in a tolerable range, is proposed for repairable items sold with a two-dimensional warranty. The objective of this work is to determine the optimal unpunctual PM strategies under the given warranty period so as to minimize the manufacturers total expected warranty servicing cost. It is shown that the unpunctual PM strategy contains its punctual counterpart as a special case and tends to result in slightly higher warranty servicing cost.