Personal Rapid Transit in New Zealand - Future Transit Now

A system consists of a variety of components that work together to accomplish a specific purpose.  Each type of component in the system has an acquisition cost that increases with its reliability, i.e. the greater the reliability required of a component the more one will have to pay for it.  With increased reliability, the component will not have to be serviced or replaced as often, so the cost of its support decreases with reliability.   The sum of the amortized acquisition cost, i.e., the annual payment for the component, and the annual support cost is the life-cycle cost (LCC).  Since the former increases with reliability and the later decreases with reliability the LCC plotted as the ordinate against reliability as the abscissa is a curve with a single minimum point.