Life‐cycle Cost Policy when Equipment Maintenance Is Imperfect Available to Purchase

Maintenance‐related costs contribute significantly to equipment life‐cycle costs. In practice, maintenance works are not perfect in the sense that they cannot restore the equipment to a “good‐as‐new” condition. Utilizing the concept of improvement factors to model the imperfect characteristics of most maintenance works, proposes a model which determines the number and timing of preventive maintenance works which are required before the equipment is overhauled. It also determines how many overhauls will be economically required before a decision is made to dispose of the equipment. The equipment disposal decision is based on an analysis of replacements which are constraints to be at the end of time cycles which may have unequal numbers of time‐periods and where the time‐periods do not have to be of equal length. This proposed replacement analysis is an extension of a well‐known replacement model in the literature.