Warranty policies and burn-in

✍ Scribed by Jie Mi

• Book ID: 101301496
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 76 KB
• Volume: 44
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-069X
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6750(199703)44:2<199::aid-nav4>3.0.co;2-4

✦ Synopsis

Warranty is an important factor for consumer durable products in the marketplace. However, the warranty cost may drastically reduce profitability. Burn in is a common procedure to improve the quality of products after they have been produced, but it is also costly. By taking both the burn-in procedure and warranty policy into consideration, several cost functions can be formulated and optimized. Assuming that the failure-rate function of the product has a bathtub shape, it is shown that the optimal burn-in times that minimize the considered cost functions never exceed the first change point of the failure-rate function. The continuous dependence of the optimal burn-in times on the model parameters and the underlying distribution is also established.