Copyright © 2009 F. G. Badía and M. D. Berrade. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper deals with the maintenance policy of a system subject to periodical inspections aimed at detecting the occurrence of failures. After the first N−1 failure, the system undergoes an imperfect repair that brings the system back to the operating condition while the N th failure is followed by a perfect repair restoring the unit to an as-good-as-new condition. The limiting average availability as well as the minimum cost policy are discussed.