Developing a Trade-off between Upgrade Action Time and Warranty Length for Second-hand Electrical Components

One way of improving the reliability and reducing the warranty servicing cost for second-hand items is through actions such as overhaul and upgrade which are carried out by the dealer or a third party. For second-hand electrical components, the improvement involves testing of items for a short time, called upgrade action time, before their release to the market. The items that fail during the test are scrapped or repaired; only items that survive the test are considered to be of good quality and released to the market. In this paper, a cost model is developed to achieve a trade-off between reducing the warranty servicing cost and increasing the upgrade action cost for a second-hand electrical component sold under various warranty policies.