Warranty Policies for Non-Repairable Products with Phase-type Lifetime Distributions

수명분포가 Phase-Type인 수리불가능한 제품의 보증정책

Ritchken(1985) analyzes free replacement and pro-rata warranty policies for products receiving renewable warranies. He shows that for constant failure rates pro-rata warranty policies are more attractive to risk-averse manufacturers than shorter term free replacement policies that result in the same average warranty cost. This paper considers the case when product lifetimes distributions are of phase-type. When this is so, Ritchken's performance measures can be simplified considerably. It is found, that irrespective of the pattern of failure rates, pro-rata warranty policies are preferable to free replacement policies. But the warranty period of the equivalent free replacement policy decreases and then increases, as product reliability(the average time between failures) increases.