Expanding Maintainability Concepts and Techniques

As electronic systems continue to increase in cost and complexity, the search for more effective maintainability concepts and techniques takes on added momentum. Recent contracts often require maintainability to be predicted during design and the predictions later validated by demonstration. To accomplish these new requirements, maintainability must develop a new and closer relationship with reliability and design engineering. This new relationship will not be difficult when probabilities of maintenance success are applied to the corrective maintenance repair time predictions. Probabilities of maintainability and reliability would then be compatible and thus effectively utilized to determine availability, the prime index for systems effectiveness. Changing maintainability requirements are discussed along with the more familiar prediction methods, as well as how these concepts and techniques can be expanded to predict the probability of maintenance success.