Optimal replacement policy for a deteriorating production system with preventive maintenance

This paper presents a new policy for determining the optimal replacement time of a deteriorating production system. The optimal replacement time is expressed in terms of the accumulated number of failures that the system has experienced. The provision of preventive maintenance is incorporated in the system model and the objective function is cost efficiency (i.e. the long-run average cost per unit working time). A numerical example is given in the paper. The basic concept used in this paper parallels the geometric process replacement policy N introduced by Lam in 1988. The work in this paper generalizes and modifies Lam's 1988 work.