Specifying Optimal Maintenance Factor in Internal Lighting Applications

In the design of lighting applications, a maintenance factor (MF) is widely used when aggravation of lighting installation parameters should be taken into account. There are many publications offering guidelines for MF value selection. Most of them suppose that predefined maintenance plan already exists and recommendations for MF value selection are given based on that. In the reality that is not a common case and the designer embeds given MF into a project without adequate notion for that how the new lighting equipment will be actually exploited. The proper selection of MF requires definite arrangement of all exploitation measures affecting lighting parameters of the equipment. In the current work the MF value is derived from the optimal set of exploitation measures. The optimality is defined as a minimum of life time exploitation cost. The task for proper MF value selection is brought to an optimization problem and all considerations connected with that are discussed in details in the paper.