Notice of RetractionAn optimal policy for maintenance, intermediate buffer, and spare parts

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Most research on maintenance is devoted to separate maintenance policy, and some other is focused on maintenance optimization with buffer or spare parts considered. However, there is no existing research taking into account maintenance, buffer, and spare parts together. In this paper, an optimal policy is proposed for a production-inventory system, in which the buffer size, the initial time of buffer accumulation, the predetermine age for preventive maintenance, and the spare part arrival time are optimized together by using Monte Carlo simulation and enumeration method. Numerical examples are delivered for sensitivity analysis of key system parameters. Additionally, the same value of minimal long-term expected cost rate is obtained during repetitive optimizations, which can be considered as the accuracy verification of proposed method.