Warranty cost analysis under imperfect repair
Author(s)
Advisor
Taner, Mehmet RüştüDate
2006Publisher
Bilkent University
Language
English
Type
ThesisItem Usage Stats
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Abstract
Increasing market competition forces manufacturers to offer extensive warranties.
Faced with the challenge of keeping the associated costs under control, most
companies seek efficient rectification strategies. In this study, we focus on the repair
strategies with the intent of minimizing the manufacturer’s expected warranty cost
expressed as a function of various parameters such as product reliability, structure of
the cost function and the type of the warranty contract. We consider both one- and
two-dimensional warranties, and use quasi renewal processes to model the product
failures along with the associated repair actions. We propose static, improved and
dynamic repair policies, and develop representative cost functions to evaluate the
effectiveness of these alternative policies. We consider products with different
reliability structures under the most commonly observed types of warranty contracts.
Experimental results indicate that the dynamic policy generally outperforms both
static and improved policies on highly reliable products, whereas the improved
policy is the best performer for products with low reliability. Although, the
increasing number of factors arising in the analysis of two-dimensional policies
renders generalizations difficult, several insights can be offered for the selection of
the rectification action based on empirical evidence.
Keywords
Imperfect repairQuasi renewal processes
Two-dimensional warranty
Warranty cost
Numerical methods