Optimal Periodic Replacement Policy Under Discrete Time Frame

Abstract

Systems such as database and socal network systems have been broadly used, and their unexpected failure, with great losses and sometimes a social confusion, has received attention in recent years. Therefore, it is an important issue to find optimal maintenance plans for such kind of systems from the points of system reliability and maintaining cost. However, it is difficult to maintain a system during its working cycle, since stopping works might incur users some troubles. From the above viewpoint, this paper discusses minimal repair maintenance policy with periodic replacement, while considering the random working cycles. The random working cycle and periodic replacement policies with minimal repair has been discussed in traditional literatures by usually analyzing cases for the nonstopping works. However, maintenance can be more conveniently done at discrete time and even during the working cycle in real applications. So, we propose that periodic replacement is planned at discrete times while considering the random working cycle, and moreover provide a model in which system, with a minimal repair at failures between replacements, is replaced at the minimum of discrete times KT and random cycles Y. The average cost rate model is used to determine the optimal number of periodic replacement.