Optimal Maintenance Policy for Second-Hand Equipments under Uncertainty

This chapter addresses a maintenance optimization problem for re-manufactured equipments that will be reintroduced into the market as second-hand equipments. The main difference of this work and the previous literature on the maintenance optimization of second-hand equipments is the influence of the uncertainties due to the indirect obsolescence concept. The uncertainty is herein about the spare parts availability to perform some maintenance actions on equipment due to technology vanishing. The maintenance policy involves in fact a minimal repair at failure and a preventive repair after some operating period. To deal with this shortcoming, the life cycle of technology or spare parts availability is defined and modeled as a random variable whose lifetimes distribution is well known and Weibull distributed. Accordingly, an optimal maintenance policy is discussed and derived for such equipment in order to overcome the uncertainty on reparation action. Moreover, experiments are then conducted and different life cycle of technologies are evaluated according to their obsolescence processes (accidental or progressive vanishing) on the optimal operating condition.