For the warranty products with high initial failure rates, one of the policies to minimize the cost associated with total system is to determine the amountof time to burn-in (in order to eliminate early failures) and the age at which to replace the product (to avoid failures due to wearout). The cost incurred during useful life, associated with field failures, is traded-off with the cost of implementing a burn-in program.
This study describes a method of mathematical analysis which is applied to find the unique optimal solution of this decision problem, when the warranty period is given. The optimal operating policy variables can be calculated iteratively. An numerical example is presented.
