On the Marginal Cost Approach in Maintenance

In this paper we investigate the conditions under which the marginal cost approach of Refs. 1–3 holds. As observed in Ref. 4, the validity of the marginal cost approach gives rise to a useful framework of single-component maintenance optimization models, which covers almost all models used in practice. For the class of unimodal finite-valued marginal cost functions, we show that these optimization models are easy to solve.