A note on the marginal cost approach in maintenance

In this paper we verify the conditions under which the marginal cost approach of Berg (1980, 1995) holds. As observed by Aven and Dekker (1996) the validity of the marginal cost approach gives rise to a useful framework of single component maintenance optimization models which covers almost all models used in practice. For the class of unimodal finite-valued marginal cost functions we show that these optimization models are easy to solve.