Investigation on economic feasibility of different maintenance rules for cable

Life-cycle cost (LCC) assessment are carried out to compare the economic feasibility of different maintenance rules, such as periodical replacement (TBM), periodical diagnosis (PDM), dual-periodical diagnosis (DDM) and the strategy of periodical replacement with one occasional diagnosis at the optimal opportunity (DTB). The maintenance rule of DDM may generally save a lot of total cost than that of PDM and DTB, and even more than that of TBM; except at some certain range of deviation of measurement parameter, which may attributed to the uncertainty of failure rate. Maintenance method DTB in this paper may be of efficiency at some certain large relative value of diagnosis expense. Moreover, the effects of some factors such as interest rate, diagnosis expense, failure expense and the dispersion of measurement parameter distribution are also discussed.