Computing the Expected End-Product Service Time Using Stochastic Item Delays

Abstract

This paper derives an expression for the expected completion time of a repair project, such as the servicing of end products, when the servicing is composed of a sequence of repair activities on parts of the end product. These parts are subject to repair with a specified probability and, at first, it is assumed that the completion time of each activity is constant. Subsequently, this assumption is relaxed so that an arbitrary probability distribution can be specified for the activity completion times. The concluding parts of the paper show how to compute the expected end-product service time for a particular class of activity-time probability distributions.