Design of a flexible preventive maintenance strategy for two-dimensional warranted products

Offering appropriate preventive maintenance strategy has an effective impact on achieving higher customer satisfaction. This article presents a flexible preventive maintenance strategy, where customers are grouped into two groups according to their usage rates, and then different preventive maintenance programs are applied to different types of customers. The product follows a two-dimensional failure process and the preventive maintenance cost is shared between the manufacturer and customer on a pro rata basis. The manufacturer's warranty cost is minimized by jointly optimizing the pro rata proportion of the preventive maintenance cost, the preventive maintenance number and the corresponding preventive maintenance levels. Numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Results prove that the flexible preventive maintenance strategy outperforms the conventional unified preventive maintenance strategy in terms of total warranty cost. Besides, some managerial suggestions are also given to provide guidance of implementing the proposed preventive maintenance strategy.