Relations of Imperfect Repairs to Critical Infrastructure Maintenance Costs

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.