Abstract We develop new models for imperfect repair and the corresponding generalized renewal processes for stochastic description of repairable items that fail when their degradation reaches the specified deterministic or random threshold. The discussion is based on the recently suggested notion of a random virtual age and is applied to monotone processes of degradation with independent increments. Imperfect repair reduces degradation of an item on failure to some intermediate level. However, for the nonhomogeneous processes, the corresponding age reduction, which sets back the ‘clock’ of the process, is also performed. Some relevant stochastic comparisons are obtained. It is shown that the cycles of the corresponding generalized imperfect renewal process are stochastically decreasing/increasing depending on the monotonicity properties of the failure rate that describes the random failure threshold of an item.
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