A Stochastic Model for Evaluating the Aging Impact on Satellite Systems’ Availability

Satellite communications have become an everyday aspect of our daily lives, and the current focus on satellite telecommunications is expected to continue to grow and gain greater prominence. On the other hand, implementing scheduled and unscheduled maintenance practices is essential to improving the availability and reliability of satellite systems. This paper presents a stochastic availability model designed through a Stochastic Petri Net (SPN) that considers the aging of satellites, offering support for infrastructure planning by integrating both scheduled and unscheduled maintenance considerations. Additionally, this research includes two case studies. The first case study explores an availability model that ignores the influence of aging, establishing a baseline of availability and second with aging. This baseline will be compared with the results obtained from the proposed SPN model, which incorporates the effects of aging. In this way, the behavior of both non-aging and aging variables can be analyzed to make contributions through the SPN that helps understand the availability of satellite systems.