System Maintainability Improvement using Allocation Procedures

System maintainability performance represents a key factor in many manufacturing fields and high maintainability become a fundamental requirement of most manufacturing products. The core of this paper is to outline a procedure for obtaining maintainability indicators: the objective is to analyse how these indicators achieve the best fitting and how they fulfil the technical information. This analysis is helpful for many purposes e.g. compare different system solutions, achieve a better maintainability performance, and predict maintainability problems. The first part of the paper focuses on maintainability allocation procedures and the core of this study are the time characteristic-based maintainability allocation models: these methods are divided between high-level and low-level product models. The second part shows a case study on a generic complex system containing redundant blocks in order to test and validate the proposed method in two different cases: case a) where the MTTR (i.e. Mean Time To Repair) target of the system can vary between 1 hour and 8 hours; case b) where the MTTR target is 6 hours.