Heuristic procedures for the single facility inspection problem with minimal repair and increasing failure rate

This paper presents the problem of setting inspection schedules for a single imperfect facility undergoing minimal repair once detected in an ‘out-of-control’ state. The problem is modelled under a non-Markovian failure mechanism with increasing failure rate. We show that the profit maximization formulation of the problem is equivalent to the cost minimization formulation and concentrate on the latter. We then develop three heuristic procedures that are shown to be very cost effective based on the results of the numerical examples used for illustration.