Optimal lot size and inspection policy for products sold with warranty

Abstract

This paper develops a mathematical model to jointly determine the optimal lot size and product inspection policy for a deteriorating production system, when products are sold with free minimal repair warranty. Due to system deterioration, a last- K product inspection scheme is proposed, under which the last K products in a production lot are inspected and nonconforming products found are reworked. Based on the model, we show that there exist a unique optimal lot size and a corresponding inspection policy such that the expected total cost per unit time is minimized. Since there is no closed-form expression for the optimal lot size, an upper bound and approximate solutions are obtained to facilitate the search process. Furthermore, an algorithm is provided to efficiently search for the optimal policy and the performance of the optimal policy is evaluated through numerical examples.