Relations of Imperfect Repairs to Critical Infrastructure Maintenance Costs

Agnieszka Blokus and Przemysław Dziula
Additional contact information
Agnieszka Blokus: Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Navigation, Gdynia Maritime University, 81-87 Morska St., 81-225 Gdynia, Poland
Przemysław Dziula: Department of Navigation, Faculty of Navigation, Gdynia Maritime University, 3 Al. Jana Pawła II St., 81-225 Gdynia, Poland

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 9, 1-19

Abstract: This article presents an analysis of maintenance costs and maintenance policy of critical infrastructure systems, considering the case of imperfect repair. The maintenance costs of the systems, considering a multistate approach and imperfect repairs, are analyzed with reference to the renewal stream and renewal process theory. Availability characteristics of repairable critical infrastructure systems with non-negligible renovation time, necessary for the cost analysis, are determined based on classical renewal theory. We assume that the system is renewed after exceeding its critical reliability state. The multistate approach proposed to availability analysis, including imperfect repairs, allows considering various configurations of the system’s renewals. The procedure for determining the total cost of maintenance up to certain point in time is proposed. Furthermore, the procedure comparing the costs of repair and operation of the system until a certain moment for different configurations of the number of repairs to various reliability states is put forward and its exemplary application is presented. Conducting perfect renewals of infrastructure to the state of entire availability seems to be the most profitable in the case study analyzed in the article. The exception is when imperfect repairs are much cheaper than perfect repairs (they are up to half of the perfect repair cost), or when costs of an infrastructure’s renewals are considered in the short period of its exploitation (up to one year). The summary provides a conclusion on maintenance policy based on the proposed procedure analysis and a comparison of maintenance costs for various configurations of perfect and imperfect repairs.

Keywords: maintenance costs; optimal maintenance policy; critical infrastructure; availability; imperfect repair; multistate failure process (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/9/4917/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/9/4917/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:9:p:4917-:d:544707

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().