On assigning service life for technical systems under inflation

Abstract

A technical system is used by an enterprise that is a typical market participant to perform specific work. During operation, the operating characteristics of the system deteriorate. In case of a possible failure of the system, it is decommissioned and this causes losses for the enterprise. It turns out that it is beneficial to assign a certain service life to the system after which (if no failure has occurred) it is subject to decommissioning. We are solving the problem of optimizing this assigned service life. Usually, when solving it, inflation is not taken into account, and the optimality criteria are the average costs per unit of time and other indicators that do not fully reflect the commercial interests of the enterprise owning the system. Using the principles and methods of valuation, we build a mathematical model and propose formulas that allow us, taking into account inflation, to find the optimal assigned service life of the system and at the same time estimate the market value of the work performed by the system and calculate the change in the market value of the system with age. Moreover, in this problem, the optimality criterion is the ratio of the expected discounted costs to the expected discounted volume of work performed by the system. We show that such a criterion maximizes the market value of the enterprise owning the system. We give examples of using the constructed model. The results obtained can be used both for solving other optimization problems of the reliability theory and for practical valuation of some types of machinery and equipment.