Comparisons of replacement policies with periodic times and repair numbers

Periodic replacement policies modeled with the history of minimal repairs have been studied extensively. However, in the viewpoint of cost rate, there is no literature to compare replacement polices which are carried out at some periodic times and at a predetermined number of repairs. In this paper, we compare these two types of replacement policies analytically from the optimizations of the integrated models. It will be shown that there always exists a degradation model when any bivariate replacement policy is optimized and this is just the best choice of the comparisons. Not only that, the approaches of whichever occurs first and last are applied to model the above two types of policies, which are named as replacement first and replacement last, respectively, and their comparisons are also made. In addition, we delay the policy at repair to periodic time for easier replacement, and the modified replacement model, which is named as replacement overtime, is compared with the original ones. Numerical examples are also given and agree with all analytical discussions.