Some New Results on Uncertain Age Replacement Policy

Age replacement policy is a commonly policy in maintenance management of spare part. It means that a spare part is always replaced at failure or fixed time after its installation, whichever occurs first. An optimal age replacement policy of spare parts concerns with finding the optimal replacement time determined by minimizing the expected cost per unit time. The age of the part was generally assumed to be a random variable in the past literatures, but in many situations, there are few or even no observed data to estimate the probability distribution of part's lifetime. In order to solve this phenomenon, a new uncertain age replacement policy has been proposed recently, in which the age of the part was assumed to be an uncertain variable. This paper discusses the optimal age replacement policies by dealing with the parts' lifetimes as different distributed uncertain variables. Several results on the optimal age replacement time are provided when the lifetimes are described by the uncertain linear, zigzag and lognormal distributions.