Availability Optimization of Two-dimensional Warranty Products under Imperfect Preventive Maintenance

For complex and durable products such as automobiles and construction machinery, the quality and reliability characteristics of these products become more and more complex. However, in many cases, the technical ability of users is not enough to perfect the daily maintenance of the product. Warranty policy plays an increasingly important role between manufacturers and users. Aiming at the problem that the availability of the two-dimensional (2D) warranty product is difficult to meet the actual needs of users during the warranty period, this paper makes use of the accelerated failure time (AFT) model to construct the failure rate function of the product based on imperfect preventive maintenance (PM), establishes the 2D warranty availability model and gives an effective solution. On this basis, this paper obtains the optimal PM interval with the numerical algorithm and particle swarm optimization (PSO) taking the maximal availability of the 2D warranty product as the optimization objective and compares the results and speed of the two algorithms. Finally, the validity and accuracy of the model are verified by a numerical example which provides a scientific basis for the manufacturer to formulate the 2D warranty strategy. © 2013 IEEE.