A method for the maintainability assessment at design stage based on maintainability attributes

The objective of this paper is to describe a procedure to evaluate system maintainability at the design stage, the results of which can support concurrent decision-making with specified maintenance requirements and the guidance of maintainability design improvement. With this purpose, maintainability indicators for decision-making and design guidance are defined based on the maintainability attributes to evaluate the system maintainability. In order to improve the objectivity and accuracy of maintainability assessment, maintainability attributes are analyzed and classified according to the view of maintenance. Then, the basic evaluation object levels and quantitative evaluation methods of maintainability attributes are presented. Based on evaluation values of maintainability attributes, the maintainability indicators are obtained using different algorithms. Finally, a case is studied to demonstrate how the proposed evaluation method can be applied in a real case.