Control limit policies for warranty, maintenance and upgrade of software systems

Software systems continuously undergo change, mostly in response to customersʹ needs and expectations, which themselves change from one period to the next. Although the cost of these changes may be many times the original system cost, there is no framework for their analysis and for bringing customersʹ views into the decision processes. In this paper, we develop a Markov decision process model for warranty, maintenance, and upgrade of software systems, using the index of customer satisfaction as the state variable. We identify optimal and near-optimal policies within the space of control-limit policies.