CHENG Shixue
Journal of Systems Science and Complexity. 1993, 6(3): 209-216.
A device is subject to damage. The damage occurs randomly in discrete time according to an increasing homogeneous Markov chain, where the incremental damage caused by a shock depends on the magnitude of the shock. The device has a threshold, and it fails once the damage level exceeds the threshold. Upon failure the device is replaced by a new and identical one and a cost is incurred. If the device is replaced before failure, a smaller cost is incurred. In this paper we study the problem of specifying a replace mentrule which minimizes the long-run (expected) average cost per unit time. Under mild conditions we show that the optimal replacement policy exists and it possesses the control limit property.