Operating characteristics of a failure counting group replacement policy

This article presents some operating characteristics of a failure counting group replacement policy. A group of identical units are put in service together. The maintenance policy applied for them is a group replacement policy based on failure count; they are replaced altogether when a number of failures reaches a certain amount. For the expected cost rate function under the failure counting group replacement policy, this article presents a method to obtain the optimum cost rate. We also show that the optimum cost rate is an increasing function in the fleet size. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the results.