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Maintainability Analysis Thesis

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Maintainability Analysis Thesis

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chaizernbang
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4 Maintainability Analysis

At the equipment and system level, maintainability has a great influence on


reliability and availability. This is true if redundancy has been implemented and
redundant parts are repaired on line, i.e. without interruption of operation.
Maintainability represents thus an important parameter in the optimization of
availability and life-cycle cost. Achieving high maintainability, requires appropriate
activities which must be started early in the design and development phase,
and be coordinated by a maintenance concept. To this belong faults detection and
isolation (built-in tests), partitioning of the equipment or system into (almost)
independent last repairable units (spare parts at equipment or system level),
and logistical support, including after-sales service. A maintenance concept has to
be tailored to the equipment or system considered. After the introduction of basic
terms (Section 4.1), this chapter deals with a maintenance concept for complex
equipment and systems, and presents then methods and tools for maintainability
calculations. Models for spare part provisioning are considered in depth in Section
4.5. Design guidelines for maintainability are given in Section 5.2.

4.1 Maintenance, Maintainability

Maintenance defines all those activities performed on an item to retain it in or to


restore it to a specified state. Maintenance is thus subdivided into preventive
maintenance, carried out at predetermined intervals and according to prescribed
procedures, to reduce the probability of failures or the degradation of the functio-
nality of an item, and corrective maintenance, initiated after fault recognition and
intended to bring the item into a state in which it can again perform the required
function (Fig. 4.1). Corrective maintenance is also known as repair and can include
any or all of the following steps: localization, isolation, disassembly, exchange,
reassembly, alignment, checkout. The aim of preventive maintenance must also be
to detect and repair hidden failures, i.e. failures in redundant elements. The time

A. Birolini, Reliability Engineering


© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1999
4.1 Maintenance, Maintainability 115

MAINTENANCE
I I
I
I I
PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE
(retainment of the item functionality) (reestablishment of the item functionality)

• Test of all relevant functions, also to • Failure detection


detect hidden failures • Failure localization
• Activities to compensate for drift and • Failure elimination
to reduce wearout failures • Functional test
• Overhaul to increase useful life

Figure 4.1 Maintenance tasks (failure could also be replaced by fault, thus including both defects
and failures)

elapsed from the recognition of a failure until the final test after failure elimination,
including all logistical delays (waiting for spare parts or for tools) is the repair time.
Often, ideal logistical support with no logistical delay is assumed.
Maintainability is a characteristic of an item, expressed by the probability that
preventive maintenance (serviceability) or repair (repairability) of the item will
be performed within a stated time interval by given procedures and resources
(number and skill level of the personnel, spare parts, test facilities, etc.). If r: and
't" are the (random) times required to carry out a repair or for a preventive
maintenance, respectively, then
,
Repairability = Pr{'t ~ t} and Serviceability = Pr{'t ~ t}. (4.1)

For a rough characterization, the expected values (means) of 't' and 't"

E['t' ] = MITR = mean time to repair

E['t"] = MITPM = mean time to preventive maintenance


can often be used. Assuming t as a parameter, Eq. (4.1) gives the distribution
functions of 't' and 't". These distribution functions characterize the repairability
and the serviceability of the item considered, respectively. Experience shows that
't' and 't" often exhibit a lognormal distribution as defined by Eq. (A6.11O).
The typical shape of the corresponding density is shown in Fig. 4.2. A characteristic
of the lognormal density is the sudden increase after a period of time in which its
value is practically zero, and the relatively fast decrease after reaching the

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