Joint optimization of degradation-based burn-in, quality, and preventive maintenance

Burn-in is an effective method to eliminate initial mortality and reduce field failure costs. As many products have been designed to be extremely reliable, traditional burn-in would almost not get a sufficient amount of failure data in a reasonable duration. If the failure associated with a degradation process, degradation-based burn-in can be implemented. Moreover, we hope the quality level of the burnt-in units is still high. On the other hand, an appropriate preventive maintenance policy can improve the operation efficiency of the product, extend the service life and reduce enormous losses brought by failures. Therefore, this research proposes a joint model of degradation-based burn-in, quality and preventive maintenance. The objective of the joint model is to minimize the expected cost per unit time by properly choosing the settings of burn-in and preventive maintenance interval simultaneously under the constraint of availability. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the proposed method.