DMTrade: A Rolls-Royce Tool to Model the Impact of Design Changes and Maintenance Strategies on Lifetime Reliability and Maintenance Cost

For complex repairable products, the lifetime reliability and maintenance cost attributes are a complex function of the component reliability distributions and the selected maintenance strategy. Understanding and accommodating this complexity is key when some components exhibit wearout, others fail randomly, and still others exhibit infant mortality. Further complications arise when some failure modes are more costly to repair than others, thereby having a disproportionate impact on lifetime maintenance cost. To fully consider these complexities, Rolls-Royce has developed DMTrade, a Monte Carlo simulation tool that simulates a product through its lifetime of failures, repairs, and scheduled maintenance. This paper defines the methodology used by DMTrade, and illustrates how this methodology can be used to identify the highest value improvement opportunities, both for product design and maintenance strategy.