OPTIMISING DESIGN CONFIGURATION FOR DESIRED RELIALIBILITY AND AVAILABILITY LEVELS OF TELECOMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Communication systems such as mobile phone systems are configured of hundreds of electronic components receiving the messages, processing them against some protocols, and distributing them over the network until connection is established. Items used are under heavy load, working in harsh environments and are very much dependable by other social systems.
This makes them very sensitive requiring high reliability redundant items to provide high availability for the system. To provide the required availability, communication provider companies use a high level of redundancy of expensive items. On failure they replace the items with new ones as quickly as possible. This in turn forces a high capital cost in terms of inventory or procurement.

This paper discusses an optimisation approach to configure a section of a complex structure in a mobile communication system at minimum cost while maintaining a desirable level of availability for the system. First availability of the system is formulated based on available data and expert opinion, then a nonlinear mathematical optimisation model is developed to identify the number of components of each type necessary to maintain the availability.