A branch-and-bound combinatorial approach to level of repair analysis

This paper proposes a combinatorial approach for level of repair analysis which is both simple to implement and a sophisticated optimisation tool. A heuristics is used to obtain lower and upper bounds on the optimum life-cycle maintenance costs and a branch-and-bound procedure searches for the optimum solution without resorting to linear-programming relaxations of the original integer programming formulation. The model can be easily extended to other applications where fixed and variable costs play a role. The combinatorial approach is purely additive, the inputs follow standard formats and the output is easily understood. A Windows-compatible user interface is used to demonstrate the accessibility of the approach.