Total repair cost limit replacement policies

Abstract

Practical applications of stochastic maintenance models frequently fail due to insufficient information on the lifetime distribution of the systems. Moreover, the structure of numerous maintenance policies which have been proposed up till now is so complicated that they have purely academic significance. This paper presents a policy for optimal scheduling of replacement intervals where decisions are based only on the maintenance cost parameters. The simple structure of this policy and the circumstance that the cost parameters are usually known facilitates its practical application.