Periodic Preventive Maintenance Policies when Minimal Repair Costs Vary at Failures

This paper considers a repairable system, which is maintained preventively at periodic times and is minimally repaired at each failure. Most preventive maintenance policies for such repairable systems assume that the cost of minimal repair is constant regardless of its age at failure. However, it is more practical to consider the situations where the cost of minimal repair is dependent not only on its age at failue, but also on the number of preventive maintenance carried out prior to its failure. We consider the preventive maintenance carried out prior to its failure. We consider the preventive maintenance policy with age-dependent minimal repair cost. The optimal policies which minimize the expected cost rate over an infinite time span are discussed. We obtain the optimal period and number of preventive maintenance prior to replacement of the system.