Minimizing the Cost of Servicing an End Product Subject to a Completion Time Constraint

This paper describes a problem in which end products, such as aircraft, are periodically serviced, owing to the failure or preventive maintenance of reparable items. Given the required sequence of item reinstallations, the item resupply times, and item repair probabilities, a relation between the item resupply times and the expected end-product service time is derived. We present an exact algorithm designed to minimize the total cost of repair subject to a constraint on the expected service time. A heuristic algorithm yielding the entire “minimum cost per expected service time” curve is also described.