Optimal maintenance service contract negotiation with aging equipment

Jackson C.; Pascual, R.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing trend to out-source service operations in which the equipment maintenance is carried out by an external agent rather than in-house. Often, the agent (service provider) offers more than one option and the owners of equipment (customers) are faced to the problem of selecting the optimal option, under the terms of a contract. In the current work, we develop a model and report results to determine the agent's optimal strategy for a given type of contract. The model derives in a non-cooperative game formulation in which the decisions are taken by maximizing expected profits. This work extends previous models by considering the realistic case of equipments having an increasing failure intensity due to imperfect maintenance, instead of the standard assumption that considers failure times are exponentially distributed (constant failure intensity). We develop a model using a linear function of time to characterize the failure intensity. The main goal, for the agent, is to determine the pricing structure in the contract and the number of customers to service. On the other hand, for the clients, the main goal is to define the period between planned actions for preventive maintenance and the time to replace equipments. In order to give a complete characterization of the results, we also carry out a sensitivity analysis over some of the factors that would influence over the failure intensity. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Más información

Título según WOS: Optimal maintenance service contract negotiation with aging equipment
Título según SCOPUS: Optimal maintenance service contract negotiation with aging equipment
Título de la Revista: EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
Volumen: 189
Número: 2
Editorial: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
Fecha de publicación: 2008
Página de inicio: 387
Página final: 398
Idioma: English
URL: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0377221707005310
DOI:

10.1016/j.ejor.2007.05.039

Notas: ISI, SCOPUS