A study of availability-based warranty policy

Abstract

This paper proposes an availability-based warranty policy for complex industrial equipments. Under this policy, the manufacturer will not only provide free repairs or replacements upon failures, but also ensure that the operational availability over the warranty period meets a negotiated level. Within the warranty period, imperfect preventive maintenance (PM) activities are performed to reduce equipment's failures. Moreover, two types of learning effects on maintenance activities, namely, ‘repetition learning’ and ‘failure learning’, are considered simultaneously. The PM schedule is optimized cycle by cycle. Within each PM cycle, the optimal PM interval is determined by minimizing the warranty cost rate over the current cycle with an availability constraint. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the proposed warranty policy.