Managing risk and uncertainty in warranty servicing policy

Rapid technological advances in many industries, especially in the electronics manufacturing industry, make products obsolete quicker than before. This requires novel approaches to managing risk and uncertainty in making warranty servicing policy. Existing approaches are developed based on estimated warranty claims of each single product but do not sufficiently employ information on the relationships between multiple products. As a result, the global optimisation might not be found and hence huge resources (i.e., capital, raw materials, etc) are wasted. Products are manufactured by the same company and compete about fixed budget, restricted stockroom or limited maintenance manpower; information on the similarities and competing factors can be very useful in searching global optimisation solutions and hence should be utilized. A literature review of warranty servicing has provided very little information specifically in this area.This proposal introduces novel heuristic and hybrid approaches to optimising warranty servicing policy for a batch of different types of products. Models for predicting warranty claims are developed on the basis of sufficiently using information associated with warranty claims, and then a modern portfolio theory based approach is introduced to model risk-sensitive decision making.The investigator will be supported by a 2-year post-doctoral research officer. There will be collaboration with other researchers in the warranty research community (for example, Professor DNP Murthy from the University of Queensland, Australia) and industrial partners (for example, 3Com, www.3com.com). The results of this project will provide the warranty research community with novel approaches to optimising warranty servicing policy and manufacturers with approaches that can save huge resources.