OPTIMISATION OF THE DESIGN PROCESS BY MEANS OF AVAILABILITY MODELLING

Customer’s buying decisions often depend on the costs which will accrue for the product during its whole life-cycle. In this paper a concept for reliability and availability based life-cycle-cost analysis is shown. Thereby main emphasis is placed on the modelling techniques for performing this analysis. The basic elements of the methods, namely Markov process, alternating renewal process, system transport theory and extended coloured stochastic Petri nets, are demonstrated and their benefits and drawbacks are shown. For the extended coloured stochastic Petri nets the modelling procedure is demonstrated on behalf of a generic example. This comprehensive methodology is able to model and analyse the logical, chronological and economical aspects as well as dependencies of the system reliability and maintenance. It enables to integrate all relevant aspects related to operation, aging and maintenance of a system, such as reliability structure, components with several operational states and general distributed failure times, failure dependencies, maintenance strategies and dependencies, queuing aspects and operational costs