A study of maintenance policies for second‐hand products

This paper proposes two maintenance schemes for reused products. In order to reduce the purchasing cost or conform to the concept of environmental protection, reuse is considered as one of the most efficient strategies. However, the initial quality of reused product is often inferior to the new one and then product failures will occur frequently during usage period. Therefore, two periodical preventive maintenance (PM) policies in this paper are developed to decrease the high failure rate of the second‐hand products. When a second‐hand product with Weibull life time distribution of known age is intended to be used for a pre‐specified period of time, the optimal number of PM actions and the corresponding maintenance degree are derived such that the expected total maintenance cost is minimized. The impact of providing preventive maintenance is illustrated through numerical examples.