Further results in the optimal policy for imperfect inspection in discrete time

The paper reports investigations into how the optimal inspection interval for a fallible system with imperfect inspection is best determined. This work can be viewed as an extension of Raz and Ladany’s (1992) work on imperfect inspection in discrete time. Here the cost functions are rewritten to include a probability conditioning that was omitted. In addition, an upper bound on the search space for the optimal inspection interval is presented. This bound allows one to find the global optimum with very modest computational effort. Insights gained from this bound and from the computational tests are used to present some general properties of the system.