This paper provides a comprehensive literature review on the problem of obsolescence in “sustainment-dominated systems” that require support for many decades. Research on this topic continues to grow as a result of the high impact of obsolescence on the in-service phase of long-term projects. Research on obsolescence also seeks to understand how it can be managed, mitigated and resolved. The pa...

The defence industry is moving rapidly towards new types of agreement such as availability contracts based on Industrial Product-Service System (IPS2) business models. Obsolescence has become one of the main problems that will impact on a system during its life cycle. Most of the research carried out has been focused on electronic components, neglecting the impact of obsolescence in other areas...

Various patterns of age dependence in hazards of organizational failure have been documented: liabilities of newness, adolescence and obsolescence. Prior efforts at providing a unified theory that can accommodate these patterns as special cases have not dealt properly with obsolescence. We tackle this problem by proposing a new model that builds on the most recent unification attempt while inte...

In this paper we consider a stochastic-demand periodic-review inventory model with sudden obsolescence. We characterize the structure of the optimal policy and propose a dynamic programming algorithm for computing its parameters. We then utilize this algorithm to approximate the solution to the continuous-review sudden obsolescence problem with general obsolescence distribution. We prove conver...

Foreword The concept of obsolescence in the industrial sector has many facets that can be summarised in the general definition provided by the International Institute for Obsolescence Management (IIOM): obsolescence is the unavailability of parts, or services, that were previously available (IIOM 2015). The need to understand, plan and mitigate obsolescence (i.e. obsolescence management) is par...

Many types of products that have to be manufactured and supported for long periods of time lack control over critical parts of their supply chain, e.g., avionics, telecom infrastructure, and industrial controls. As a result, the components and technologies that these products depend on become obsolete long before the product’s field life (and sometimes even manufacturing life) ends. Obsolescenc...

Croston’s method is generally viewed as superior to exponential smoothing when demand is intermittent, but it has the drawbacks of bias and an inability to deal with obsolescence, in which an item’s demand ceases altogether. Several variants have been reported, some of which are unbiased on certain types of demand, but only one recent variant addresses the problem of obsolescence. We describe a...

Dynamic finite versioning (DFV) schemes are an effective approach to concurrent transaction and query processing, where a finite number of consistent, but maybe slightly out-of-date, logicalsnapshots of the database can be dynamically derived for query access. In DFV, the storage overhead for keeping additional versions of changed data to support the logical snapshots and the amount of obsolesc...