Maintenance concept optimization — A new approach to LORA

The traditional Level of Repair Analysis (LORA) concept was developed to provide decision support when choosing where, in a support organization structure, to perform repairs. The analysis determines at what level in a hierarchical support organization it will be most cost effective to repair each component in a technical system, considering the investment in maintenance resources, e.g. personnel and test equipment. The traditional LORA, however, does not consider the large impact the repair level decision has on the spares investment nor the strong dependency between different items for the system effectiveness. Furthermore, it cannot handle asymmetric organizations, i.e. organizations where the operation of systems differs a lot between bases not sharing the same supporting station. Since both technical systems and their support solutions are becoming more and more complex the requirements for decision support in this field has changed, and traditional LORA has become obsolete. In this paper a new approach to LORA and Maintenance Concept Optimization is presented. This approach is more relevant and up to date with current requirements and it is also a lot more powerful than the traditional item-by-item approach for LORA. The new approach offers a simultaneous optimization of maintenance locations, maintenance resources, spare parts and repair/discard decisions. The approach offers a fast and effective methodology for reaching cost-effective logistic support solutions with the objective of achieving high system effectiveness.