Notice of RetractionA product design decision model based on usage intensity for items under warranty

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.

The product usage intensity is different across the buyer population. This will affect the product degradation and failure, and in turn affect the warranty cost. The expected warranty cost for a high-intensity user is more than for a light user. Thus if the manufacturer offers the same warranty to all buyers and determines the sale price based on the average usage intensity, it is unfair to low-intensity users as they receive less benefit than high-intensity users. And it might not be optimal for the manufacturers. One option for the manufacturers is to produce different products for different usage intensity groups and sell the products with the various warranty policy at different prices (higher reliability, price for high-intensity user). This is considered as product variety design based on user-requirement characteristics. Providing different products for different groups can meet the user requirements, reduce the total warranty cost but at the expense of increasing total manufacturing cost. The trade off between the manufacturing and warranty cost is an important consideration at the design stage for products under warranty. Based on the early researches, a product variety design decision model is presented in this paper so as to minimize the total cost or maximize the profit for the product under warranty. The model classifies the usage population into several groups and provides different products for various groups. The commercial and technology issues are synchronously incorporated. And the model of a s- ecial case is analyzed, too.