Lifetime-characteristics and inspection-schemes for Levy degradation processes

Providing customers with efficient maintenance policies is of great interest to suppliers of complex industrial equipment and devices. Generally, developing such policies requires a great amount of data, and often these data are specific to each individual customer and each device "generation." For a fairly general and useful class of degradation processes (Levy processes) this paper characterizes properties of device lifetime distributions, and shows how these properties can be used to modify maintenance policies for different customers or when a device is improved, e.g., through design changes.