Analysis of a two-dimensional stair-case warranty policy with preventive maintenance

We develop a mathematical model to study optimal preventive maintenance (PM) strategy under a two-dimensional stair-case warranty policy considering both age and usage of a product. During the warranty term, sellers implement preventive maintenance within the stair-case region of the warranty policy and upon failure a product is repaired minimally and immediately. Our objective is to find the optimal PM strategy that minimizes the seller's cost of warranty while jointly considering the age and usage intervals of the PM policy and the level of PM executed. We also discuss how our results compare to those in a two-dimensional warranty policy with a rectangular region, and we find that the stair-case policy is preferable for sellers. An algorithm is provided to find the optimal solution and a numerical example is presented to illustrate how to find an optimal strategy with our proposed method. We show numerically that the expected total warranty cost is convex both in the age and the usage of the product under certain conditions. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications. All rights reserved.