Spare Parts Decision under Reliability Growth and Warranty Repair: A Customer Perspective

摘要

This study investigates a maintenance decision problem in which the equipment reliability increases post the installation. This situation often arises when a new design is introduced to the market, and the manufacturer improves the reliability through corrective actions. On-site spare parts stocking and on-call repair are the two primary means to attain the system availability goal. We compare the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches by taking into the consideration of the fleet size, the mean-time-to-replacement, and the reliability growth rate. The study shows that an on-site sparing is favorable to the customer if the system reliability is low or the installed base is large. The on-call repair becomes more attractive only if the reliability reaches the maturity phase. Numerical examples drawn from the semiconductor equipment industry are used to demonstrate the application and performance of the proposed method.