Comparison of Inspection Policies

In this paper, we compare an optimal inspection policy by Barlow et al. with nearly optimal ones by Kaio and Osaki, Munford and Shahani, and Nakagawa and Yasui. We obtain the result that, for the Weibull and gamma distributions, there are no significant differences between the optimal and nearly optimal inspection policies. We recommend the simpler-to-compute policy of Kaio and Osaki since it is nearly optimal.