An approach for optimal maintenance planning of radio communication devices considering reliability and operational costs

The paper presents an approach for assessment of recommended preventive maintenance intervals of radio communications devices due to the reliability of the equipment and operational costs. This approach is based on the previously proposed technique that considers as an optimality criterion two integrated reliability measures, Inherent Availability and Achieved Availability. The performed research has shown that the range of rational periodicity, which is an interval between optimal and allowable periodicity, can be rather wide that requires the application of an additional criterion. In this paper, we suggest improving the existed optimality criterion by taking into account operational costs. Consequently, the proposed approach consists of the improved criterion and simulation model providing the estimation of the reliability and cost measures. The results of the performed experiments show that adding the operational costs as an additional criterion makes it possible to achieve a doubling reduction of the range for the assessment of the rational maintenance periodicity.