Valuation of machinery and equipment subject to the Wiener degradation process

Abstract

We propose a model describing the decrease in the market value of machines (depreciation) with age. Usually it is characterized by the percent good factor, i.e. the ratio of machine’s value to the value of similar new machinery item. Often, appraisers know about a used machinery item only by its age, but not its performance. Therefore, for the valuation of the machinery item of a known age, they have to use the mean (for machines of this age) of percent good factor. In the proposed model, the state of the machine is characterized by the intensity of the benefits it brings. In this case, the benefits from using the machine in a certain period are defined as the market value of the work performed by it minus operating costs. We describe the change in the intensity of benefits over time by the Wiener process with negative drift. This allows us to take into account the tendency for the performance of machine to deteriorate during operation. The market value of a machine is defined as the maximum mathematical expectation of the sum of discounted benefits from its use. It is shown that it corresponds to the moment the machine reaches a certain boundary state. The parameters of the Wiener process (drift and volatility) are expressed through the known characteristics of the machine's durability, namely the average value and the coefficient of variation of the service life. The dependences of the mean percent good factor of machines on the relative age (the ratio of age to the average service life) are found. It turned out that these dependencies are almost independent of the discount rate and average service life.