A value-oriented maintenance approach for product protection in EPR policies

EPR policies have the potential to be valuable and sustainable business opportunities. Operational leasing is an effective EPR implementation strategy, where the lessor maintains the product ownership, therefore controlling every phase of product life cycle. Hence the interest of protecting product’s value across multiple use-cycles. In the case of items subject to wear and tear, such as mechanical components, the maintenance strategy is central to maintaining product’s global value, protecting it from losses due to obsolescence and degradation. The recent systemability approach gave the opportunity to refine maintenance policies taking into account the operating environmental effects. However, degradation prediction models often take into account the manufacturer/lessor perspective, in a cost-effective approach, neglecting the service level requested by the user and the intrinsic characteristics of the leased product. Among these, the item’s memory of the failure state is relevant. In this work, the authors propose to integrate, into the systemability paradigm, the user acceptance threshold and the memory effect of the fault state. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed approach may significantly vary the maintenance frequency and the product's use-cycle duration, towards protection of service value for the user and functional value for the manufacturer.