The optimal warranty servicing for repairable products with phase-type lifetime distributions

This paper considers warranty servicing for repairable products when product lifetimes are phase-type (PH) distributions. Two replace–repair strategies are analyzed based on renewal processes. The quantities of interest can be expressed in terms of the renewal function which, in general, is very difficult to evaluate. By exploiting properties of PH distributions we obtain simplifications to evaluate these performance measures. Numerical examples for four different PH distributions with typical hazard functions are presented and the results are discussed.