Abstract This paper studies the cost-minimizing serial asset replacement problem under changing operating and replacement costs. Technological improvements affect these costs in different ways, which leads to different duration of sequential replacement cycles of the same asset. Therefore, a firm should optimize a chain of consecutive asset replacements using available information about future costs. We offer a novel multi-cycle algorithm for making such replacement decisions and prove that it converges to the infinite-horizon solution when the number of cycles increases. Important qualitative properties of the obtained optimal non-equal-life replacement strategies are derived, and practical recommendations are discussed.

中文翻译：

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不断发展的技术下的非等寿期资产置换：一种多周期方法

摘要 本文研究了运营成本和重置成本变化下的成本最小化系列资产重置问题。技术改进以不同的方式影响这些成本，从而导致同一资产的连续更换周期的持续时间不同。因此，公司应该使用有关未来成本的可用信息来优化一系列连续的资产置换。我们提供了一种新颖的多周期算法来做出此类替换决策，并证明当周期数增加时，它会收敛到无限范围的解决方案。推导出了所获得的最佳非等寿命替代策略的重要定性特性，并讨论了实际建议。