Hybrid minimal repair and age replacement policy for two-dimensional warranted products

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a hybrid minimal repair and age replacement policy for a repairable product sold with a two-dimensional non-renewing failure replacement warranty. We first model product failures using the one-dimensional approach and then use a more appropriate formulation to model the effect of age and usage to the product degradation. Under this policy, for a given usage rate y, the product is directly repaired minimally when it fails in (0, Sy] and replaced with the new one on the first failure in (Sy, ?y] or when its age reaches ?y, whichever occurs first. We obtain the global optimal solution of Sy, for a given ?y which minimises the expected cost per unit time to the buyer. We present numerical examples to illustrate the properties of the optimal solution.